By Beth Hoffman
Novels featuring strong, southern women have always delivered good stories with characters that people can relate to, enjoy and care about. "Saving CeeCee Honeycutt" is such a novel. It centers on 12 year-old Cecelia Rose Honeycutt and the women who shape her life one summer in Savannah.
It's the mid-1960's and CeeCee has spent most of her young life caring for her mother Camille, a former beauty queen who is slowly slipping into psychosis and reliving her days as the Vidalia Onion Queen of 1951. CeeCee's father is a traveling salesman whose stops home become shorter and shorter because he cannot deal with his wife's illness. CeeCee's one spot of normality is her aged neighbor, Mrs. Odell and the books she can escape into when her mother is too much to handle.
Novels featuring strong, southern women have always delivered good stories with characters that people can relate to, enjoy and care about. "Saving CeeCee Honeycutt" is such a novel. It centers on 12 year-old Cecelia Rose Honeycutt and the women who shape her life one summer in Savannah.
It's the mid-1960's and CeeCee has spent most of her young life caring for her mother Camille, a former beauty queen who is slowly slipping into psychosis and reliving her days as the Vidalia Onion Queen of 1951. CeeCee's father is a traveling salesman whose stops home become shorter and shorter because he cannot deal with his wife's illness. CeeCee's one spot of normality is her aged neighbor, Mrs. Odell and the books she can escape into when her mother is too much to handle.
When Camille is killed by a truck, CeeCee's great-aunt Tootie Caldwell, whom she has never met, shows up and whisks her off to Savannah to live for the summer. In this picturesque Georgia city, CeeCee sees another side of life than what she has become used to and she also meets a group of women that will affect her life and help her to grow. There is of course her aunt Tootie who is involved with seeminly every good work and organization in the historic city, her housekeeper, the all-knowing Oletta Jones, the exotic neighbor Miss Thelma Rae Goodpepper, who bathes in her backyard and even the insufferable Violene Hobbs, at whose house the local police officer has been seen in compromising situations. With the help of these women and the beauty of Savannah, CeeCee begins to heal and enjoy being a child once again.
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