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Summary
Summary
The one thing you can depend on in Cold Sassy, Georgia, is that word gets around - fast. When Grandpa E. Rucker Blakeslee announces one July morning in 1906 that he's aiming to marry the young and freckledy milliner, Miss Love Simpson - a bare three weeks after Granny Blakeslee has gone to her reward - the news is served up all over town with that afternoon's dinner. And young Will Tweedy suddenly finds himself eyewitness to a major scandal. Boggled by the sheer audacity of it all, and nota little jealous of his grandpa's new wife, Will nevertheless approves of this May-December match and follows its progress with just a smidgen of youthful prurience. As the newlyweds' chaperone, conspirator, and confidant, Will is privy to his one-armed, renegade grandfather's second adolescence; meanwhile, he does some growing up of his own. He gets run over by a train and lives to tell about it; he kisses his first girl, and survives that too. Olive Ann Burns has given us a timeless, funny, resplendent novel - about a romance that rocks an entire town, about a boy's passage through the momentous but elusive year when childhood melts into adolescence, and about just how people lived and died in a small Southern town at the turn of the century. Inhabited by characters who are wise and loony, unimpeachably pious and deliciously irreverent, Cold Sassy, Georgia, is the perfect setting for the debut of a storyteller of rare brio, exuberance, and style.
Author Notes
Olive Ann Burns was born July 17, 1924, on a farm in Banks County, Georgia, and attended school in Commerce, Georgia. She received a degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1946.
Between 1947 and 1957, Burns wrote for the Sunday magazine of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. In 1956 she married the magazine's editor, Andrew H. Sparks. From 1960 to 1967 Burns wrote under the pseudonym Amy Larkin for the advice column "Ask Amy."
In 1975, after being diagnosed with cancer, Burns began her best-known work, Cold Sassy Tree (1984). An entertaining story about a family living in rural Georgia around the turn of the century, it is loosely based on stories told to Burns by her own family members. Burns explained that her previous experience as a journalist was helpful to her in writing the novel, but that she never intended for it to be published. Three years into her writing Burns had recovered from the cancer but was determined to finish the novel. It would take several more years to complete.
Cold Sassy Tree was so successful that Burns began a sequel when her cancer returned. In the final days of her life, she left instructions for the completion of the book. Leaving Cold Sassy was published according to her wishes.
Burns died in July 1990.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Booklist Review
With folksy exuberance, a boy recalls how his grandfather stood their turn-of-the-century Georgia hometown on its ear. (O 15 84)
Kirkus Review
A folksy, foxy down-Georgia-way tale, lubricated with tangy 1906 dialect--all about the scandalizing' and gaskin' that goes on in the town of Cold Sassy when one-armed Grandpa Blakeslee (a new widower) up and marries pretty, 30-ouch milliner Miss Love Simpson. The narrator is 14-year-old Will Tweedy, who's on hand when his Grandpa announces to daughters Mary Willis (Will's Ma) and Aunt Lamia the news about his upcoming wedding--no disrespect to departed Grandma intended. (After all, ""She's dead as she'll ever be, ain't she?"") And Will watches as Grandpa--fabled one-punch fighter, Confederate vet, owner/operator of a General Merchandise emporium, stingy autocrat--changes under the influence of his new bride. Suddenly there's rollicking music coming from the parlor piano; the lively Miss Love trims Grandpa's beard; there's a trip to New York for both; Miss Love talks him into buying an automobile--and even selling the delightful driving machines! But, though Grandpa's a new man while Miss Love is admired for her cultured talk and admirable headgear, family and neighbors are appalled. So, with some virtuoso snooping, Will discovers some odd facts about the May/December union--the biggest shocker being that Miss Love is wife in name only, having wed, as she had honestly explained to her suitor, only for a home of her own. Will she always be? What's the dark secret in her past? Who is that big Texan who barges in and wants to take her away? And meanwhile, in between sleuthings, Will has adventures and some revelations of his own: he's almost killed by a train, rescued by mill-girl Lightfoot McLendon; his consciousness about the despised mill children is raised a bit; he has an on-going battle with Aunt Lamia, married to no-good Camp (Will spreads the rumor that Lamia once nursed a pig); and it's Will who offers the compassionate graveside oratory at Grandpa's jolly, town-gathering funeral. Life with Grandfather--chummy nostalgia in red clay country, uninspired but pleasant. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Burns scored with Cold Sassy Tree, a 1984 best seller. She managed to complete 15 chapters of the Leaving sequel before she died, desiring that they be published along with her notes for the remainder of the story. Even incomplete, the 1992 release managed best-sellerdom. Both books chronicle small-town Georgia life in the early 20th century. Charmers. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.