Like The Golden Age before it, Dream Days recounts scenes from childhood with great feeling and detail. It has the same exuberant, joyful respect for the innocence and seriousness of bygone childhood imagination. A wonderful read for both young and old alike. Contents: The Twenty-first of October; Dies Irae; Mutabile Semper; The Magic Ring; Its Walls Were as of Jasper; A Saga of the Seas; The Reluctant Dragon; and A Departure.
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Like The Golden Age before it, Dream Days recounts scenes from childhood with great feeling and detail. It has the same exuberant, joyful respect for the innocence and seriousness of bygone childhood imagination. A wonderful read for both young and old alike. Contents: The Twenty-first of October; Dies Irae; Mutabile Semper; The Magic Ring; Its Walls Were as of Jasper; A Saga of the Seas; The Reluctant Dragon; and A Departure.
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I love THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS, and had expected to love this book too. Instead, I found it a rather tedious bid for sympathy for the author's childhood, one in which he and his orphaned siblings were raised by aunts for whom he had enduring spite.
I have little patience with books that depict adults as the enemies of children --and the idyllic rural setting in which the orphaned children shared their childhood with their aunts sounds blissful, an invitation to imaginative play. The author's account of it makes more vivid his scorn for "the Olympians" (the aunts who offered them a comfortable home are never named) that it does the warmth that may have existed between the siblings. (it would be interesting to know if his siblings may have enjoyed those years more than did young Kenneth.)
I'd never choose to share this book with a child; it is unattractively mean-spirited. I assume his later adult life was happier, allowing us to have the book that made his name.
Were it not for the lovely illustrations, my rating would have been one star.