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. Before her death in 1990, Olive Ann Burns expressed her wish that the fifteen chapters she had written of Wills story be published as they are here, along with. Complete with Olive Ann Burn's notes for later scenes and chapters exactly as she wrote them, Leaving Cold Sassy is a final, loving goodbye to Cold Sassy, Georgia.The one thing you can depend on in Cold Sassy, Georgia, is that word gets around-fast.

The result is Leaving Cold Sassy - a portait of the grown-up Will Tweedy of the feisty young schoolteacher who captures his heart of the town that has claimed a place in the American imagination and, in a fascinating reminiscence by her editor, of Olive Ann Burns, a writer who didn't get a chance to finish her extraordinary tale. Created and edited by Justin Kestler and Ben Florman, SparkNotes Literature Guides provide analysis of (currently) 175 classic works of English and foreign. Only during her final days did she realize she wouldn't complete it, dictating from her hospital bed her wishes that the finished chapters be published. Throughout her long battle with cancer, Olive Ann Burns worked passionately on a sequel to this magical book. Cold Sassy Tree, Olive Ann Burns unforgettable story of a Georgia town at the turn of the century, has captivated millions of readers with its tale of Grandpa Blakeslee, his young bride Miss Love, and the irrepressible fiteen-year-old Will Tweedy.

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