Writing is the best way I know to stay in touch with my wiser self, a chance to pause each day and make sure I’m appreciating life as we are living it - right here, right now. I wanted time to enjoy my children as children, time to play games on the floor, daydream, and read aloud at bedtime. When my two sons were small, I constantly had to remind myself: if I raced through life, I’d miss it. "I am a wife, a mother, a homemaker, a slow writer and a life-long reader, a list maker, a recovering perfectionist, an inveterate seeker. 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. 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. He gets run over by a train and lives to tell about it he kisses his first girl, and survives that too. 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.
Boggled by the sheer audacity of it all, and not a 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. And young Will Tweedy suddenly finds himself eyewitness to a major scandal. 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.
The one thing you can depend on in Cold Sassy, Georgia, is that word gets around - fast.
Katrina Kenison, who edited the book, will join the discussion by phone. All are welcome to join the discussion of this novel of warm humor and honesty as told by Willy Tweedy, a 14-year-old boy living in a small, turn-of-the-century Georgia town.
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