Medicine for Melancholy and Other Stories Book

***NO SPOILERS***

Note: This review is for the short story "All Summer in a Day," which was the title I originally shelved; someone changed the book page to A Medicine for Melancholy and Other Stories.

"All Summer in a Day": the four-page short story with a greater lasting impression than many short stories five times as long. Bradbury envisioned a continuously dreary, rainy Venus populated by humans who have moved there from Earth. Every seven years, for a single hour on a single day, Venus's rain stops, and the sun shines as brilliantly as on the hottest summer day. The setting for this monumental event is a classroom of ecstatic, eager third-graders who have always lived on Venus, except for one, who moved to Venus at age four and is able to remember a life without endless rain.

Despite minimal dialogue, the story's pace hums along; however, more dialogue would have helped greatly with characterization, which is cardboard. The main character is timid, the rest of the children a group of envious bullies, and that's that; nevertheless, somehow there's still something very human about it all. For sure, this is emotional, and the ending yanked on my heart strings. It seems clear, though, that Bradbury was enthralled by his premise, so that was what got priority, and really, the premise is so good that I can't ding him for the flat characterization.

Furthermore, Bradbury's prose is outstanding: original and simply beautiful. It's never weighed-down with pretentiousness or ambiguity but clean and straightforward:Margot stood apart from them, from these children who could never remember a time when there wasn't rain and rain and rain. They were all nine years old, and if there had been a day, seven years ago, when the sun came out for an hour and showed its face to the stunned world, they could not recall. Sometimes, at night, she heard them stir, in remembrance, and she knew they were dreaming and remembering gold or a yellow crayon or a coin large enough to buy the world with. She knew that they thought they remembered a warmness, like a blushing in the face, in the body, in the arms and legs and trembling hands. But then they always awoke to the tatting drum, the endless shaking down of clear bead necklaces upon the roof, the walk, the gardens, the forest, and their dreams were gone."All Summer in a Day" is a short story that will appeal to many, including children as young as the story's characters. It isn't obscure like some (usually older) science fiction; it's to-the-point, creative, and emotional. Bradbury could even have taken this captivating premise further and into much more complex territory, but this could be a case of "less is more."

Note: Readers looking for this story in print form can find it in this anthology:

Note 2: A t.v. short based on the story came out in 1982: