Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns
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Book Reviews of Cold Sassy Tree
Book Review: Excellent
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a fantastic heartfelt novel by the late Olive Anne Burns. This novel showcases the great skill and talent that she possessed as a writer. Very touching, funny and moving. Loved it!Book Review: GREAT BOOK
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is such a great read. The use of narrator is very well done. I have to say that anyone who gave this book 1 or 2 stars is an idiot. Sorry but it had to be said.Book Review: good service, good condition
Summary: 5 Stars
would order again, book came in good time
and in fine condition, good job!
Book Review: Incredible First Novel [70]
Summary: 4 Stars
In this 1984 novel about 1906 events in small town U.S.A., Faulkner-like melodrama meets the turn of the century post-construction Georgia. Will Tweedy, as eldest grandson to bossy but friendly Rucker Blakeslee, narrates the story of adult issues with his youthful and naive perspective, but somewhat refined as this book is drafted as though rewritten from a childhood journal made in 1906.
Grandpa Blakeslee, who lost only one fight in his life - the Civil Way - runs a shop, which runs the town of the title name. Within the confines of the simple small town live great kiddish pranks amid bigger than life paradoxical concepts of that time: how long to mourn; how many years to separate a proper marriage between man and wife; whether having a second family can be allowed; suicide; incest; and civil separations between "white trash" cotton pickers and the rest.
This literary quilt is folded among great stories told to the author by her grandfather. I fathom that the author's ear is acute as the book brilliantly meshes the above-referenced concepts within the confines of thick southern dialect depicting folklore and southern convention. The characters are southern folk who may seem cold and remonstrate to northern visitors. But, they are warm, and to all. The white characters are not running out to the barn to jump on their horses while wearing sheets over their faces and carrying torches to burn or lynch. These are more like the people we met in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. Albeit this is Georgia, and Faulkner is Mississippi, each touches upon the intermeshed and cooperative lives of former slaves or descendents of slaves, poor white, agrarian, or working-class Southerners, Southern middle class. Unlike the anthem for Southern literature, Gone with the Wind, this book is devoid of Southern aristocrats.
Eventually, like many novels centering upon the town's and family's patriarch, death ensues. And, after the death, the book must leave its pithy and remarkably well written dialogue to have things like Rucker's will read and other issues be reviewed without the accent, syntax or Southern charm of Will's "way of talkin'."
The infectious manner of the speech, combined with the vividness and uniquity of the tales, make this book special. At the end, in a Faulkner vein, one would ask for a sequel. And, Olive Ann Burns complied with less successful Leaving Cold Sassy. Maybe she is no Faulkner, and I am sure that was not her ambition. And, anyway, who is a Faulkner? This is good fiction. Very good fiction - especially for a first novel.
Book Review: A Great Place to Re-Visit
Summary: 4 Stars
I knew I would love reading Cold Sassy Tree when I picked it up last week, because I had read it before, many years ago, what I didn't expect was to find its lessons, old and classic as they are, to be so relevant to the world today. The hero of the book, Rucker Blakeslee, is heroic because of his fierce determination to pursue his own happiness while caring for those he loves, even if it appeared to those nosy and ever so proper neighbors and even family members who watched him so closely, that he had gone completely off his rocker. It is through the close observations of the story's narrator, 12 year old Will Tweedy, that the reader sees the true motivations and truly brave and loving character that Grandpa Blakeslee is.
Set in a small southern town on the brink of modernization, Olive Ann Burns' novel is funny, poignant and inspiring. Like the town itself, Cold Sassy Tree's inhabitants are taking tentative baby steps toward maturation and new ways. Will's adolescent adventures in romance, and his father's daring purchase of the town's first new automobile, are allegories of what these sheltered and set-in-their ways people are experiencing: thoughts and things that are different than what they are used to. And no townsman is more stubborn and settled in the old, nor more daring and dogged in his explorations of the new than Grandpa Blakeslee.
In today's world of rapidly changing thought, theory and technology, Olive Ann Burns' novel inspires us to think outside the box, and teaches us not to prejudge others who may appear to be off their rocker. Cold Sassy Tree also reminds us that while we bravely pursue the new and the maybe better, it is the undaunted and active loving of those around us that ultimately makes us heroic.