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Farewell Summer - Ice Cream Cones Don't Last
If you were to ever ask me, I'd reply that there are two novelists I don't like - Charles Dickens and Ray Bradbury. And then you'd find me in my study on a rainy Saturday afternoon lost in my umpteenth reading of Bleak House.
So to with Ray Bradbury. I've refused to purchase Farewell Summer since it first came out in the fall of 2006. It has beckoned at me from libraries and book stores for a year and a half. "I don't like Bradbury," I've muttered to myself in book stores from San Francisco to New York, from Chicago to New Orleans.
I picked up a copy last weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it. Reveled in it. Wondered at the simplicity of the words and the depth of the thought.
Farewell Summer is, on the surface the story of a "war" between a group of boys who don't want their summer vacation to end and the head of the local school district who didn't want summer to ever start. It is situated in a small town in Illinois at the beginning of the 20th Century and is described with Bradbury's standard elegance.
On a deeper level it is the fight of 13 year old Douglas Spaulding and 81 year old Calvin Quartermain to come to terms with growing up and growing old. It is a tale of the end of a magical summer where anything is possible - even friendship between adversaries.
A wonderful summer read it would be. If you haven't read this book, you should.
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To identify the elements of style, perhaps we should begin by eliminating the idea of correctness.
- Mario Vargas Llosa
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