This is probably one of the most poetic, evocative, simmering-with-autumnal-atmosphere books ever written. My parameters for what constitutes 'purple prose' are different to the majority of reviews mentioning it, I guess, because to me it means overly – pointlessly – descriptive writing, and in this book, it is the point. The cloying sensitivity of the senses when you're a child on the brink of teenagehood, the way everything about the world seems bigger and grander and there's this tipping feeling between restlessness and contentment, the magical spookiness of a carnival that is clearly wrong in some way – it's all infused into the writing perfectly, and it's just a wonder how creatively Bradbury sculpts sentences. Such a good coming-of-age story.