Well, first thing's first: I think calling Dandelion Wine a novel is pushing it juuuust a little. Yes, he ties everything together, often with little blurbs in the middle that were clearly written as afterthoughts, but I'd much rather this be listed as a series of short stories all about the same town and the same small group of people. If I tried to read it as a novel, I kept getting thrown out of the story by the character jumps and the lack of storyline. So I just read it as a series of short stories, and suddenly the everything made sense again. Hooray! 
 That being said, I have to admit that this is one of the few times I've wished Goodreads did half stars; this "novel" definitely deserves a 3.5 instead of a 4. If these stories had been written by anybody else, I probably wouldn't have finished the entire book. This isn't because the stories were bad, mind you; I just prefer my stories to have more monsters and aliens in them. Thankfully, I remain convinced that Bradbury can make absolutely anything sound magical without even trying, and it's his lyrical prose that saved the day once again. I swear I will never get tired of reading this man's work. I'm kind of ridiculously sad that he died and there won't be more of it coming out. 
 I don't really have much to say on the story itself. It's beautiful for what it is, but I feel like I can't appreciate a lot of it the way someone else might. Having been born in 1987, reading about life in 1928 is like reading about life in a completely different world for me, and I'm only good with other worlds when the people there aren't just, you know, normal every day human beings. I need the magic and the aliens! If it's magic and aliens it's make-believe and people never lived that way! If it's not magic and aliens, it was real, and once upon a time there were trolleys, and lime-vanilla ice cream, and ice houses, and doctors that made house calls, and no television, and no internet, and people still used horses to get around sometimes! And I never lived that. Any of it. Nor, for that matter, have I ever really lived in a small town, and never stayed anywhere for terribly long; if nothing else, I was always the one leaving my best friend behind. So, yeah. A few things remain true through all time (the end of the book, for example, when the school things are being shown in the shop again), but for the most part, it's just a strange new world that I can't get a handle on. 
 On the other hand, have I mentioned that Ray Bradbury can make anything seem magical? Because everything was beautiful and magical and ridiculousy nostalgic, no matter how distant the reality seemed from the life I've known. 
 TL;DR: I only liked it because Ray Bradbury wrote it. I would have liked it better with aliens and/or monsters. No shame in that, right?