Here is novelist Lee Smith 's description on the 1994 edition's jacket: "This novel is about identity and community as much as it is about passion and morality. It deserves many, many readers. Julia Oliver captures those hot days of Alabama in the '30s better than anybody, and all the complications of race and class and place."

The following is found on the jacket flap of the 1994 Black Belt Press edition: Goodbye to the Buttermilk Sky is set on a picturesque cotton farm between two small towns in central Alabama, during the summer of 1938, when the Depression and the boll weevil ruled the economy; religion was polarized between rival sects of Methodists and Baptists; and gossip overheard on party lies was obligingly passed on, even by the telephone operator. The young farm wife Callie Tatum's affair with an insurance salesman from Birmingham sets off a chain of events, including rape and murder, that explode against the pastoral backdrop like fireworks. Readers will not soon forget Callie Tatum, who during this fateful summer evolves from naivete into a maturity and independence that make her a contemporary in spirit.