Ray Bradbury is best known as a science fiction writer through novels such as The Martian Chronicles, but his work also contains a collection of short stories that are more fantasy and magic realism in tone and content.

Dandelion Wine is a novel published in 1957 and consists of interlinking short stories that cover one summer in a small town. The year is 1928, and the town is Green Town, Illinois.

The stories feature recurring characters and are book ended by the twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding marking the start and the end of summer. The language is poetic in places and some find the overall effect too sentimental.

Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don’t they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers

This is, however, Ray Bradbury, so there is always a sense of menace. Danger is present in the shadows and in the nearby ravine. The world presented is both homely and dangerous. A serial killer known as The Lonely One, both thrills and scares the local children. Menace lurking in the shadows of parental safety is a common template for coming-of-age tales.

 Long before dawn, long before police with flashlights might probe the dark, disturbed pathway, long before men with trembling brains could rustle down the pebbles to his help. Even if they were within five hundred yards of him now, and help certainly was, in three seconds a dark tide could rise to take all ten years from him.

Because the novel has a range of recurring characters it is, however, more than a coming-of-age tale. One of those characters is Leo with his attempts to create a happiness machine. Leo wants to make the machine to cure others of their melancholy. His wife Lena is unconvinced and the act of building the machine creates a strain between them.

When it is complete his wife and son both take turns testing it and both are unsettled by the experience. Viewing what she wants and doesn’t have creates unhappiness, but her objection is more than that.

“Sunsets we always liked because they only happen once and go away.”

“But, Lena, that’s sad.”

“No, if the sunset stayed and we got bored, that would be a real sadness.”

The machine is destroyed in an accident and Leo decides not to rebuild it. He finds happiness by participating in life, his family life in particular, rather than passively consuming pleasure.

Written in the 1950s and set in the 1920s the themes of the novel still resonate. Celebrity news and Social Media often seem like a modern-day version of the happiness machine. It is people’s consumption rather than anything intrinsic to the news or technology that makes them a happiness machine.

People create the life they wish they had on social media without the complexity of good, bad, and mundane. There is nothing wrong with this if it is merely a scrapbook or photo album. Why would you record anything other than the highlights? It is, however, unhealthy to consume it as an accurate view of life. That is the point at which it becomes a happiness machine.

The name of the book, Dandelion Wine, refers to the wine that Douglas’s grandfather makes, bottling the taste and memories of summer in all its complexity. The novel has never been out of print and the many alternate covers, when viewed together, seem to further make the point about the summer being idyllic, dangerous, scary, sad, and full of joy.

I want to feel all there is to feel, he thought. Let me feel tired, now, let me feel tired. I mustn’t forget, I’m alive, I know I’m alive, I mustn’t forget it tonight or tomorrow or the day after that.