Saving Ceecee Honeycutt

Saving Ceecee Honeycutt (2009) by American novelist Beth Hoffman follows a 12-year-old girl growing up strong despite her unstable past in the late 1960s town of Willoughby, Ohio. Hoffman’s first novel, Saving Ceecee Honeycutt, became a New York Times Bestseller. Hoffman owned a major interior design company in Cincinnati, Ohio; she sold the company once she decided to write full-time.

Its themes include mental illness, forgiveness, female friendship, conniving characters, class snobbery, and racism.

Cecelia Rose Honeycutt (who goes by ‘Ceecee’) is the daughter of the mentally ill Camille and an emotionally abusive father, Carl.



Camille used to have it made: she was a beauty queen (albeit as the Vidalia Onion Queen) and had seemed to have a bright future. But after she married Carl (who was a success in high school and also seemed to be going places) everything went downhill. Carl decided that he and his new wife would leave their home state so that he could have a mediocre job in Ohio. Camille never recovered from the move. She was so far from her friends and family, and she (unlike her daughter) never made friends all that easily. The verbal abuse from Carl also didn’t help her become her true self.

Some of Ceecee’s earliest memories revolve around caring for her mother. In fact, the novel opens to the seven-year-old Ceecee witnessing her mother in the middle of a psychotic breakdown where she wanted to whisk her daughter away to Georgia. Another time, when Ceecee was nine, her mother would put on her old pageant dress and go shopping, or stand on the sidewalk near their house and blow kisses to the cars going by. Ceecee was deeply embarrassed by this behavior, and Carl showed little patience (or sympathy) for his wife’s increasingly erratic meltdowns. Even in 1967, Camille just can’t believe that she’s no longer a beauty queen from 1951

One day, Camille is struck dead by an ice cream van.



Carl claims he can’t deal with Ceecee, so he moves her to live with her great-aunt Tootie Caldwell. At first Ceecee is heartbroken to be torn away from her friends and her hometown. But she soon finds out that the move to Savannah, Georgia (her new home) is probably for the best.

Great-aunt Tootie is a wealthy woman who lives in a mansion down south. She’s a very kind woman and she’s full of useful advice for her young grand-niece. In her regal-looking convertible, Great-aunt Tootie travels with Ceecee to Georgia. She ends up seeing the ocean for the very first time.

Ceecee befriends Oletta Jones, the mansion’s cook, who has a big heart despite her incredibly large body and perpetually serious face. Oletta is just as wise as Tootie. She (along with her regionally famous cinnamon rolls) gives the entire house a very welcoming presence. It doesn’t take long for Ceecee to start to like each of the slightly eccentric characters she meets up and down Gaston Street. Oletta is good enough to introduce Ceecee to other members of her family, including Oletta’s Aunt Sapphire.



Violene Hobbs is a racist woman who loves to gossip. When Ceecee meets her, Violene is romantically involved with a police officer. She’s especially caught up in the trial of a black man (the young Lucas) who purportedly stole a white woman’s belongings on a beach. Oletta prays that a racist criminal justice system doesn’t harm him.

When Carl comes to visit Ceecee, the other women of the house successfully protect her. He claims that he just happens to be travelling to Chattanooga, Tennessee, and thought he’d stop by to say hi, but they all suspect (and are later proven to be correct) that he really wants something from Ceecee.

“Miz” Themla Rae Goodpepper is (contrary to her name) an evil woman who will say one kind thing to your face then complete some underhanded action when you’re not looking. She’s known around town for wearing mini-cymbals on her fingers and wearing odd clothing of discordant colors.



As she grows up in Savannah, Ceecee learns more about the history of slavery and the continual enforcement of segregation. She even has a close call with the KKK.

Under the influence of several eccentric ladies, Ceecee has a repressed memory surface: she actually saw her mother get hit by that ice cream truck.

Her father sends Ceecee her mother’s old pearls. Not only are the pearls themselves emblematic of the relationship she had with her mother, but they also remind her of an important story her mother imparted to her with the pearls as an example: though nature usually creates things that are imperfect (even pearls), Camille never believed that Ceecee wasn’t anything short of perfect.



One day, her cousin Adele (back in Ohio) dies.

By the end of the novel, Ceecee accepts the fact that she lost one mother, but has, in a sense, gained a dozen more. The novel ends with a big party in which all of the main characters are happy.