Saving CeeCee Honeycutt (read in 1-24-2010)

When you meet the author it just makes it so much sweeter. Doesn't it? I don't know if having met Beth Hoffman made me like the book even before I actually read it. But the truth is I did. When you meet CeeCee her life is in turmoil but as the book progresses you see how the "Book of her Life" unfolds. And I say this in quotation marks because that is one of the many lessons she will learn (and is part of the book). The book is like a garden full of blossoming flower-friends that offer petals of wisdom to CeeCee. At the end, ; you think about your "purple-velvet-sofa kind of girlfriends" (P.112); you want to have friends like the characters in the book and you know you have friends like the eccentric and fabulous women in the book. The most important of the flowers is the blossoming of CeeCee herself who changes from a wallflower, like the flowers her mother sees on the wallpaper -when she has one of her episodes- (p.19) into a blossoming flower ready for anything that comes her way. CeeCee Honeycutt is a beautiful Southern garden where the flowers of her life open CeeCee to what nature and the world holds for her. CeeCee is a book about possibilities, about love, about friendships. I think Beth said cpoined it better than anyone else when she said at the Books and Books presentation that her family was gold but that her girlfriends were the diamonds in her life. I couldn't agree more.