Cold Sassy Tree

The one thing you can depend on in Cold Sassy, Georgia, is that word gets aroundfast. When Grandpa E. Rucker Blakeslee announces one July morning in 1906 that hes aiming to marry the young and freckledy milliner, Miss Love Simpsona bare three weeks after Granny Blakeslee has gone to her rewardthe news is served up all over town with that afternoons dinner. And young Will Tweedy suddenly finds himself eyewitness to a major scandal. Boggled by the sheer audacity of it all, and not a little jealous of his grandpas 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 grandfathers 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 boys 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.