Just Finished Reading Ray Bradbury's Farewell Summer

First of all, let me warn the reader that, although I usually try to leave the ending of books I read out of my reviews in order to avoid "giving it away", this time around I made an exception.  So if you haven't yet read Ray Bradbury's novel Farewell Summer and are thinking of doing so, you might want to put off reading this article until afterward...

Back when I was in high school, I read Ray Bradbury's short novel Dandelion Wine.  For some reason, the paperback book cover depicted it as some kind of scary science fiction/horror story.  Nothing could be further from the truth: it was a nostalgic journey by Bradbury back to his childhood days, about a boy like himself growing up in a small Illinois town back in the late 1920's.  To this day I regard it as one of my favorites.  Dandelion Wine was published in 1957, and a sequel, titled Farewell Summer, came out in 2006.  In it, the protagonist, Douglas Spaulding, has aged a few years and is now 14.  His younger brother, Tom, is 12.  The two, along with their buddies, are waging "war" against the old people, who they suspect of never having never been young and of conspiring against the children.  So, in this "war" of theirs, they do foolish things like steal the chess pieces which Douglas says the elderly are using to control them, as well as break the town clock in order to keep time from making them older.  The elderly folk in town are largely unaware of the kids' concerns...except for Quartermain, who thinks that Douglas murdered his elderly hypochondriac friend by shooting a cap gun at him (causing a heart attack) and was trying to kill him by running over him with his bicycle.  Quartermain, after open hostility and suspicion toward Douglas and his friends, eventually decides to try a different tactic and be nice to them.  As the book draws to an end, he realizes that, never having married or had children of his own, he has missed out and forgotten what it is like to be young like the boys.  Finally, in an enigmatic twist at the book's end, Bradbury implies that there is a mysterious "spirit" of sexuality that the outgoing generation transfers to the emerging one.  I found this part at the end to be somewhat weird...and ultimately hilarious.  I think a lot of that was in the wording Bradbury used.  Another, rather serious flaw I saw in the book was how he made children in the 12-14 age range think and speak more like 6-8 year olds...

If you have read Dandelion Wine, which to me is a complete story in itself, and think that you're going to get the same quality story in Farewell Summer, be forewarned: it isn't.  Instead, it is a more philosophical discussion on aging, generation gaps, and the passing on of the "torch of life", so to speak, from one generation to another.  Not a bad topic for discussion, but in my opinion Bradbury went about it in the most annoying way possible.  Then again, you may think differently if you read it...