Cold Sassy Tree is the undeniably entertaining and extraordinarily moving account of small-town Southern life in a bygone era. As their marriage inspires a whirlwind of local gossip, fourteen-year-old Will Tweedy suddenly finds himself eyewitness to a family scandal, and that’s where his adventures begin. He is barely three weeks a widower, and she is only half his age and a Yankee to boot. Rucker Blakeslee, elopes with Miss Love Simpson. On July 5, 1906, scandal breaks in the small town of Cold Sassy, Georgia, when the proprietor of the general store, E. I recommend that a whole new generation visit the South which Olive Ann Baker loved and wrote about so well.Paperback. Mariner Books is re-issuing Cold Sassy Tree along with its unfinished sequel, Leaving Cold Sassy. The story is lively and funny and poignant by turns and has been called the most realistic portrait of a small town in the early 1900s ever written.

Thus begins a years of an emotional rollercoaster ride for Will and his family, with all of Cold Sassy looking on in fascination and horror. When his horrified daughters protest, Grandpa remarks that while he loved Grandma for many, many years, he sees no reason to wait a year to remarry, because “she’s as dead as she’s ever gonna be, ain’t she?” and stomps off. Three week after his wife of 36 years dies, Grandpa announces to his family that he’s going to marry the (much) younger Miss Love Simpson, who works in his shop. Interesting as Will is, the real main character here is his Grandpa Blakeslee. She based the story on her own parents and grandparents’ stories. It’s told from the viewpoint of 14-year-old Will Tweedy in the colorful Southern dialect which took Burns years to get just right.

A real perfectionist, she wrote and rewrote and re-wrote, looking for the perfect words with an obsession for detail.Ĭold Sassy Tree is the story of a family living in a small Georgia town at the turn of the century–1906. People across the country loved the book, and though Burns tried to write its sequel, she died six years later with only the first 14 chapters written. Olive Ann Burns was 59 when she published her first and only book, Cold Sassy Tree, which became an instant classic in 1986.

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