Olive Ann Burns. Cold Sassy Tree. New York: Dell, 1984. Print.

Cold Sassy Tree has been compared to To Kill a Mockingbird for its evocative setting. Instead of Macomb, Alabama, around 1935, we have Cold Sassy, Georgia, in 1906. There is a similar sense of small town South with its religious and social divisions. Like the Harper Lee novel, Cold Sassy Tree is told from the point of view of a youth, fourteen year old Will Tweedy.

Perhaps more like Tom Sawyer, Cold Sassy Tree contains humorous or adventurous episodes sprinkled into a story of a family’s year-long struggle with change. Will is a prankster and a daredevil. He lies between the rails of a train trestle when a train comes by. He tells wild stories about his married aunt who is only six years older than he is. We laugh with Will as we might with Tom Sawyer. Lest we start waxing nostalgic, harsh realism intrudes. The effect is more like The Color Purple or Sometimes a Great Notion than Tom or Huck.

The changes in the story begin when Will’s fifty-nine year old grandfather Rucker Blakeslee marries a thirty-four year old woman just three weeks after his first wife dies. This brings out long-simmering family tensions, especially concerning Will’s Aunt Loma and her phlegmatic husband; and nearly everyone in town despises Grandpa’s new “Yankee” bride.

In spite of the turmoil and shock, Grandpa Blakeslee does his best to hold things together even if his style is unorthodox. (Literally so, when he begins holding “church” Sunday mornings in his parlor.) Will’s family becomes the first in the town to own an automobile, and we see them make other transitions to the twentieth century, adding electricity, indoor plumbing, and even a Graphophone.

In spite of some cruel and shocking scenes, Cool Sassy Tree does end with uplift. There is a sense that our character truly counts regardless of what life throws at us. The Roman playwright Seneca is credited with coining the term “a life well lived.” If we can look back and say that a person had a life well lived, perhaps that is enough. And if that person’s outlook becomes a model of us, then perhaps we can look ahead to say that we had a life well lived one day.