Farewell Summer

Farewell Summer took Bradbury fifty years to write. He had always known that Dandelion Wine needed a sequel, that Douglas Spaulding's story was incomplete, but every time he attempted it the book resisted him. When he finally finished it in 2006, he was eighty-six years old.

The novel returns to Green Town in late summer 1928, just as Dandelion Wine ended. Douglas and his friends are waging a low-grade war against the old men of the town, led by the ancient and formidable Calvin C. Quartermain, who controls the school board and seems to represent everything that curtails the freedom of children. But as the battle unfolds, Douglas begins to understand that the old men were once boys themselves, and that the distance between youth and age is not as vast as he had believed.

It is a gentler book than its predecessor, suffused with the particular melancholy of a writer who had lived long enough to be both Douglas and Quartermain. Bradbury understood, by the end, that the war between youth and age is not a war at all but a conversation across time.