It was a cooling September night, with the first sniff of autumn in it. Next week, and the children would be raked in off the fields like so many leaves and set to burning in the schools

La muerte de su esposa lo ha dejado con miedo de perder a Jim. La analogía que usa es maravillosa, si tenés dos preciosos objetos de porcelana y uno se rompe, proteges al otro. El hecho de la posibilidad de que el que queda se rompa es convincente, no es solo un riesgo teórico. La pérdida ya la ha sentido, ya ha tenido este sufrimiento Este cuento corto me gustó más que Fahrenheit 451. Me sentí como si estuviera viendo un episodio de the twilight zone. La forma como está escrito es mucho mejor y el tema es muy interesante. Three families’ lives become increasingly intertwined when they meet during tutoring sessions for their children. Throughout the summer and into the fall, the adults become more and more preoccupied with each other, leaving the kids to amuse themselves. But what exactly are the kids up to? I can say I didn’t expect his choice. But parenting can be difficult especially if you weren’t parented well yourself - just a side comment - it may or may not have had anything to do with the story. Ray Bradbury’s short story left us with questions. The more I write this the more I liked the story. By the end though, I was riveted as the true nature of the characters was revealed. I don’t often read twisty plots, so it was fun to go through the unraveling process. It’s fair to say I wasn’t completely surprised by the ending, but it didn’t play out exactly as I expected. My RatingWe’re a book blog based out of Minneapolis, MN. We feature a group of women writers from multiple countries who all come together over one thing: our love of books!

Ray Douglas Bradbury, American novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, screenwriter and poet, was born August 22, 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois. He graduated from a Los Angeles high school in 1938. Although his formal education ended there, he became a "student of life," selling newspapers on L.A. street corners from 1938 to 1942, spending his nights in the public library and his days at the typewriter. He became a full-time writer in 1943, and contributed numerous short stories to periodicals before publishing a collection of them, Dark Carnival, in 1947. The Playground is part drama, part mystery, and part psychological thriller about 3 couples so caught up in the drama of their relationships that they become blind to the extremely dangerous games their children are playing. When a tragedy occurs, their lives implode. ONCE IN A LIFETIMEThree low-income families have been given a handsome retainer to join Geraldine Borden for a day at her cliffside estate. All the parents must do to collect the rest of their money is allow their children to test out the revoluti...These characters are not the most likeable, I'll be honest, but they do have this power over you where you want to know all their secrets because they all have them. Each of these families may seem normal on the outside, but behind closed doors it is anything but. It is clear that they all have some form of dysfunction in their lives and perhaps that leads to the obliviousness when they are all together - leaving the children to get up to whatever games they want...games that aren't all that safe it turns out. And was he mistaken or was the light within the Playground of a peculiar intensity? Every child seemed to possess four shadows: one dark, and three faint penumbras which made it strategically impossible to tell which way their swift bodies were racing until they bashed their targets. Yes, the oblique, pressing light made the Playground seem deep, far away, and remote from his touching. Or perhaps it was the hard steel wire fence, not unlike those barriers in zoos, beyond which anything might happen. It’s 1953 and Ray Bradbury wrote a story about parenting and playgrounds. The main character – Dad – is a widower. He may have had a hard time grieving or taking on the role of being a single parent. His sister has been living with him for six months now to help. That seems - but don’t know 100% sure - to have gone well until today. His son is three years old and she left him in the park play ground when she went shopping. The Dad freaks out on that. Why is the question of the day! Did he think his son was too young for this? (I did but the story isn’t about me!) Was he projecting his past? Is it his cascade of unhappy memories or fear or guilt from his childhood memories that haunts him and makes him take the actions he does? Or is it a quasi-observation on parenting and the bullies and rough kids that came out of the fog of his dream mind and took over? Or did his sister make a bad choice that scared him “almost to death”?

I love Bradbury's writing, and recently read Dandelion Wine (see my review HERE), which is semi-autobiographical interludes of a summer of his childhood, in a town he calls Green Town. I was startled that this was also set there, as it's much darker, and with a stronger supernatural element. Some,” replied the boy on the playground. “Maybe this is the only one like this. Maybe it’s just how you look at it, Charlie. Things are what you want them to be.” I remember how scary it was then years later, he found the unexpected steel in his spine to stand up for what he thinks is right regardless of whether his views were shared by his classmates, and treating the schoolyard bullied with strength and dignity that suddenly showed all of my family what an amazing young man he's growing up to be. I remember how I always wanted to shield him from the world that has teeth - and how beautifully he has done without our protection, how he did not need a well-intentioned guiding hand, how he used the meanness of the world to grow up to be a very decent man. If you're a parent or an older sibling, you probably know this feeling very well - the intense protectiveness and the fear of letting the child step out alone into the big and cruel world. After dinner, he took Jim for a brief walk while his sister was washing the dishes. They strolled past the Playground under the dim street lamps. It was a cooling September night, with the first dry spice of autumn in it. Next week, and the children would be raked in off the fields like so many leaves and set to burning in the schools, usingtheir fire and energy for more constructive purposes. But they would be here after school, ramming about, making projectiles of themselves, crashing and exploding, leaving wakes of misery behind every miniature war.Niño al parque a jugar, pero Charlie se siente preocupado, entiende que los niños son malos y que la infancia apesta, por lo que desea proteger a su hijo y no quiere que juegue en el parque. Clearly bullied as a child, a father will do everything in his power to try to achieve the unattainable: to protect his child from any hurt and pain and suffering that others can inflict. I will! Those little beasts, you should’ve seen them. Jim’s my son, he is; he’s not yours, remember." He felt the boy’s thin legs about his shoulders, the boy’s delicate fingers rumpling his hair. "I won’t have him butchered."

Underhill también es un ejemplo de un personaje que lucha contra la corriente de la vida y la sociedad, similar a Montag en Fahrenheit. Estos personajes se niegan constantemente a aceptar lo que otros ven como "la forma en que son las cosas". Claro que sufren por ello, pero si no fuera por tales visionarios, los sufrimientos de todos continuarían en el mismo patrón durante generaciones. He weathered the first blast of sound, blinking. His nostrils took over when his eyes and ears retired in panic. Here's the thing. I figured this one out very early on. But that's ok. I don't mind figuring things out as long as the rest of the ride is still a fun one to be on. This one is a bit bumpy at times but phew. I think I had love/hate relationships with almost all the characters and just needed a bit more. With everything going on, some things didn't get fully fleshed out. I may have almost liked it more if it had been written more from the kids' perspectives. And while I have a lot of why why why going on in my head by certain things, sometimes it's better to just enjoy the journey. Married since 1947, Mr. Bradbury and his wife Maggie lived in Los Angeles with their numerous cats. Together, they raised four daughters and had eight grandchildren. Sadly, Maggie passed away in November of 2003.At first there seemed absolutely nothing whatever to see. And then as he adjusted his attention outward from his usual interior monologue, the scene before him, a grey, blurred television image, came to a slow focus. First off--what is with the title? There is not one playground mentioned in this book, it has nothing to do with playgrounds. I'd call this a domestic thriller, set within a group of people who meet when they sign their children up for dyslexia tutoring (which is never really mentioned much except that it was a reason why they got together at first). The couples kind of become friends because their children become friends and everything goes from there. I saw where it was going from a mile away, but it was still a decent and readable thriller overall. Charles’s sister, Carol, who has moved in to help raise the young boy, feels differently. The playground, she believes, is preparation for life, and Jim will be more equipped to deal with the rigor and obligation of adult existence by facing it. Ray Bradbury has never confined his vision to the purely literary. He has been nominated for an Academy Award (for his animated film Icarus Montgolfier Wright), and has won an Emmy Award (for his teleplay of The Halloween Tree). He adapted sixty-five of his stories for television's Ray Bradbury Theater. He was the creative consultant on the United States Pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair. In 1982 he created the interior metaphors for the Spaceship Earth display at Epcot Center, Disney World, and later contributed to the conception of the Orbitron space ride at Euro-Disney, France. Was childhood a time of never-ending play and wonder and happiness? Or was it a time of being terrorized by other children who beat and bullied and belittled us? It’s hard to remember accurately, once we’ve grown up.