Twelve-year-old CeeCee is in trouble. For years, she's taken care of her mother, Camille, the town's tiara-wearing, lipstick-smeared laughingstock, a woman who is trapped in her long-ago moment of glory as the 1951 Vidalia Onion Queen. When tragedy strikes, Tootie Caldwell, CeeCee's long-lost great-aunt, comes to the rescue and whisks her away to Savannah. There, CeeCee is catapulted into a perfumed world of prosperity and Southern eccentricity--one that appears to be run entirely by strong, wacky women. Both hilarious and heartbreaking, Saving CeeCee Honeycutt charts the journey of an unforgettale grils who loses one mother, but finds many others in the storybook city of Savannah.
I'm going to start with: overall, this book was good. It wasn't great, but it was good. I was able to set it down and forget about it for several days at a time so it isn't what I would consider very engaging. But when I did sit down and read it, I enjoyed it.
It is a nice story about a girl who grows up with a hard life, experiences and tragedy, and takes a whole summer to get over said tragedy. She's not exactly in a depressed state the whole summer because it takes that whole time for her to come to terms with her relationship with her mother and what happened to send her to Savannah.
The back of the book mentions that the town seems "to be run entirely by strong, wacky women" and that is definitely noticable in the story. There might be four or five men in the story mentioned by name. Most of the women are widows (one because her husband killed himself because she was so annoying), women who left their overbearing husbands, or women who were left by their no-good husbands. The story isn't trying to put men down or anything, I just think it is strange that there aren't any strong men mention in the story. Maybe Beth Hoffman just didn't know how to create male characters - this was her first novel - so she created a story that didn't need them.
On the back cover and the first few pages of the book there is tons of praise for the story but, personally, I think it is all a little over-rated. One person said "I barely stopped laughing. . . " but I only laughed out loud a few times. Another person said "I would not be surprised if [this book] becomes an American classic" which I think is a little extreme.
However, a lot of descriptions were thrown around that I do agree with: charming, sweet, delightful. It was a good, easy read. If you have some time on your hands, go ahead and read it. If you are pressed for time, there are better books out there.
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