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``Farewell Summer'' by Ray Bradbury; William Morrow ($24.95)
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If Ray Bradbury fans have been waiting for a sequel to "Dandelion Wine," the mostly autobiographical book about one summer in the science fiction/fantasy author's childhood, it's finally here.
Even though Bradbury, now 86, continues to churn out original stories and books, "Farewell Summer" took 55 years to get into print.
The story picks up at the end of a summer for Doug Spaulding - a thinly disguised Bradbury - and his friends and younger brother in Green Town, Ill., a stand-in for his boyhood home of Waukegan, Ill.
Doug and his friends lament the end of the season of staying out late, fireflies and glasses of lemonade while shivering in anticipation of autumn.
All of the boys wish their summer could last forever, so they come up with a plan to stop time, a plot that involves firecrackers and the large clock in the town square.
Watching Doug and his carefree friends laugh and play are four old men whose leader is the cantankerous School Board president Calvin Quartermain.
The two groups antagonize each other, the septuagenarians yelling at the adolescents to pipe down, stop having fun and grow up, the youngsters shooting the geezers with their cap guns never dreaming that some day they, too, will be old.
"Farewell Summer" is filled with beautiful imagery as Bradbury captures the sights and smells of the end of summer, what it feels like to be afraid of something you can't see in the dark and the taste of a first kiss.
He imagines the end of summer not as a barely perceptible change of light, temperature and leaf color but as a "great rushing sliding iron sound like a guillotine blade slicing the sky" that hits his town with a shudder. It's the first wind blowing in from the north, carrying the scent of winter.
Bradbury is at his best when fantasizing what goes on inside the brains of young boys and old men.
And like many of Bradbury's recent stories, it's a gossamer-thin book that's rich in detail but slight on plot.
In an afterword, Bradbury explains that his publishers thought his original manuscript was too long and suggested he publish the first 90,000 words about Doug Spaulding's summer - "Dandelion Wine" - and save the second half for another book about what happened after summer faded.
In the meantime, Bradbury wrote "Something Wicked This Way Comes" and "R is for Rocket" among many novels and short story collections while "Farewell Summer" fermented in his mind.
For those who read "Dandelion Wine" and wanted to know what happened to Doug Spaulding, here's your chance to find out. The question is: why did it take so long?
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(c) 2006, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Distributed by Mclatchy-Tribune News Service.
