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A review by carolynf
Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns
2.0
It is kind of funny, in places. The protagonist (Will) is a 14 year old boy in the small and very Southern town of Cold Sassy in 1906. The town is named after a very old sassafras tree, and is thinking about changing the name. Modernity is encroaching on the town in other ways too, but mostly the town remains obsessed with tradition and gossip about who is breaking tradition. The central event of the book is the decision of Will's grandfather to re-marry just two weeks after his wife's death, and to a Yankee-ish (from Baltimore) much younger woman named Love. This is a huge scandal and of course Love is the one who is blamed and targeted by the town. The question of whether she will ever be accepted is what is driving the plot.
Most of the book centers on two types of humor - laughing at the often cruel pranks played by Will (and sometimes other characters) and laughing at the distress of other characters over things that seem petty to us as readers. Both of these are ways of "laughing down" at people that is tolerable in small doses but feels cheap after a while. Towards the end of the book Love tells a story about her past that is very sad and shocking, and not in keeping with the tone of the book at all. To me the events of the story do not explain her character as much as they conflict with it.
Unlike The Help, both the Black people and White people in the book are rendered in dialect. The White characters approve of the Black characters in the book, because they don't go against the established social order. The grandfather is a Confederate veteran and part of the reason why he is in a hurry to remarry is because he doesn't believe in hiring Black people but cooking and cleaning are seen as demeaning for a White woman to do (for money). At one point Love gently points out to Will that the Black people in his life know that if they ate the same food off the same plates as their White employers everyone would lose their minds, so they pretend to prefer to drink out of jam jars and eat out of pans to save face. He doesn't take it well in that moment, and it isn't brought up again later in the book.
Most of the book centers on two types of humor - laughing at the often cruel pranks played by Will (and sometimes other characters) and laughing at the distress of other characters over things that seem petty to us as readers. Both of these are ways of "laughing down" at people that is tolerable in small doses but feels cheap after a while. Towards the end of the book Love tells a story about her past that is very sad and shocking, and not in keeping with the tone of the book at all. To me the events of the story do not explain her character as much as they conflict with it.
Unlike The Help, both the Black people and White people in the book are rendered in dialect. The White characters approve of the Black characters in the book, because they don't go against the established social order. The grandfather is a Confederate veteran and part of the reason why he is in a hurry to remarry is because he doesn't believe in hiring Black people but cooking and cleaning are seen as demeaning for a White woman to do (for money). At one point Love gently points out to Will that the Black people in his life know that if they ate the same food off the same plates as their White employers everyone would lose their minds, so they pretend to prefer to drink out of jam jars and eat out of pans to save face. He doesn't take it well in that moment, and it isn't brought up again later in the book.