A review by balancinghistorybooks
Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns

1.0

I had had a copy of Olive Ann Burns' Cold Sassy Tree on my to-read list for an awfully long time. Whilst I adore Southern novels, having held onto it for so long did not bode well for me; ordinarily, I would have read it within a month or two. I have tried to pick the novel up on numerous occasions, but always end up putting it down after a few pages, as it holds very little interest for me. Burns' plot and writing did not pull me in at all, and I found the dialect used incredibly overdone; it really put me off. After reading a few reviews, I expected that the ensuing story would be too saccharine for my tastes, and am thus carting it off to the local Oxfam Bookshop this weekend.

There are so many authors who have written marvellous novels and short stories about the South - Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, Harper Lee, William Maxwell, William Faulkner, and Kathryn Stockett, to name but a few - and I will be sticking with largely grittier stories than Burns' in future. Oh, and it makes me a little cross that someone dared compare this to To Kill a Mockingbird on the novel's back cover; this is a line which I would not personally have drawn, as no book can stand up to Harper Lee's brilliance in my opinion.