Book #31: Saving CeeCee Honeycutt

Title: Saving CeeCee Honeycutt
Author: Beth Hoffman

I spent the last few drives to and from school listening to Saving CeeCee Honeycutt. Sometimes when I listen to an audiobook, I look for any excuse to listen to something else. If the book is really challenging or boring, it even makes me not want to run. It's at those times that I usually turn to my cache of This American Life podcasts and listen to those instead. Over the last few days, I've been looking forward to my runs and my drives down to campus, and I think it's in large part because this book was so easy to listen to. CeeCee Honeycutt is a twelve-year-old Ohio girl whose spent the last few years caring for her mother, who suffers from mental illness. After her mother runs in front of an ice cream truck, CeeCee's dad (a traveling salesman) farms her out to live with Aunt Tootie in Savannah, Georgia. The rest of the book takes place over the course of a single summer in Savannah, as CeeCee adapts to the changes in her life.

While the story was easy to listen to, there were definitely things about it that I found troubling. For one thing, it seems in early chapters that CeeCee is going to grapple in some significant way with the specter of mental illness. But once she gets to Aunt Tootie's house, her fears about inheriting her mother's disease are mostly swept under the table. And for that matter, Tootie and Oletta, the maid/cook/sage adviser who runs the household, are pretty good at sweeping lots of things under the table. There's lots of opportunity to talk about race relations in the book (it takes place in the mid-1960s) and while the book does discuss Martin Luther King and the problem when white men perpetrate crimes against black women, once again, the problems seem to be solved relatively easily. Finally, it bugged me that all of the characters in the book were female, or else they were slimy. CeeCee's dad is a jerk, then a guy tries to rob them, and there are a few drunks and philanderers along the way, but the only good guy (Tootie's husband Taylor) is a dead guy. I'd like to see at least one good man in the book. However, I do think the book has an audience-- I'm sure my mom will love it.