Teaser Tuesday: Cold Sassy Tree

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:
• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share a few “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!


I needed a break from all the paranormal romance. That, and I haven't been back to my book group since they made me read a Regency romance novel. (And I liked it.) It was time for me to try another book outside my little corner of dork. October's selection is a classic novel that I've heard about for ages -- and pretty much every other book group has already read it. I've heard it compared to To Kill A Mockingbird so I was imagining something dark and political, best over-analyzed by English teachers everywhere. Soooo glad I was wrong!

Will Tweedy's grandmother died but three weeks ago and just when he thought his summer couldn't get any worse, his grandfather remarries. It's bad enough that he ruins the family name by taking up with a woman half his age but must he carry on so with a Yankee? 

Finally, my years in Texas taught me something (other than the fact that you can't drown a cockroach). This book, set in Georgia not long after the Civil War, is so dialect heavy that I found myself reading lines aloud just to get correct words in there. Fortunately, I knew several people who mutated the language like these characters so I was able to follow. The writing is funny and smart. And I might just be enjoying yet another book group selection--something I swore wouldn't be possible after they held a bookmark to my throat and forced me to read A Thousand Splendid Suns.  

Here's the Teaser:

"According to Temp, the deacons voted to put it in the church records that "Mary Willis Blakeslee has swapped her religious birthright for a mess of matrimonial pottage." It made Grandpa mad as holy heck. "Anybody calls Hoyt Tweedy a mess of matrimonial pottage," he roared, "thet man is a-go'n answer to me." The deacons struck the pottage part from the record."

- pg. 13, Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns

What are you reading?