Saving CeeCee Honeycutt

I just finished Saving CeeCee Honeycutt by Beth Hoffman, which was kindly given to me by a friend who interned at Penguin this past semester.

A short summary: main character Cecelia Rose Honeycutt has looked after her psychotic mother for most of her twelve-year-old life while her father has been traveling for work--and also to get away from his family's problems. When her mother passes away in an accident, young CeeCee is whisked off to live in Savannah, Georgia with her great-aunt. Over her first summer there, she meets a host of eccentric and loving women who help her begin to heal all the wounds inflicted upon her by cruel circumstance.

The book is a love song to the South (and also a bit of a downer about the North, which I'm sure would rub a few people the wrong way) and a testament to the power of female companionship. It was a bit disconcerting, too, in that though it is an adult's book, it is written completely from the twelve-year-old main character's perspective, which means that sometimes the reader understands things the protagonist does not, and also that the writing seems a bit elementary at times, when really it's just reflecting the protagonist's point of view.

I was touched by the author's brutally honest descriptions of CeeCee's mother's antics, and of the pain that CeeCee feels because of them. A few quotable quotes:

"And now here I was...thinking about how much easier everything would be if my mother was locked up in a sanatorium. I sometimes even wished she were dead. It was terrible to think such a thing, but I just couldn't help it. I'm not saying I wanted to skip through life in a rosy blur from one Disney experience to the next--all I longed for was to know one whole happy day." (22)

"As I knocked on her door, begging her to let me in, I realized I had just taken my father's place: there I was, standing outside her locked bedroom door, frustrated and helpless and just plain tired. Tired of it all." (76)

"I wondered if I'd ever be so lucky to have a girlfriend I'd grow old with, a girlfriend who knew my secrets, my fears, my hopes--and loved me anyway." (111-112)

"I felt selfish and small as I watched my aunt from the kitchen window. She had given me so much, so freely, yet I was unable to do something as simple as sit at her side." (115)

"'But I guess some folks is willin' to pay anything for hope.'" (145)

"'Ain't no sun in the kitchen without your face lookin' up at me.'" (142)

"'Don't go wastin' all them bright tomorrows you ain't even seen by hangin' on to what happened yesterday. Let go, child. Just breathe out and let go.'" (290)

"'It's how we survive the hurts in life that brings us strength and gives us our beauty.'" (302)

Also, I'm not going to lie: with the book consisting of such a female-dominated world, I felt as if homoeroticism was the huge elephant in the room the whole time I was reading. Everyone's husband was dead or divorced with or absent in some other way, but there were just so many women. I almost felt like it was a slight cop-out on the part of the author. I'm not saying she needed some sort of graphic scene of homoeroticism, but she could have hinted at it subtly the way other things were hinted at in the novel. I do applaud her portrayal of free female sexuality, though.

Beloved

It took me weeks to finish reading Toni Morrison's Beloved. I began reading it right as I was leaving India, and only finished it up last week. Chalk the slow pace up to its being a bit impenetrable at times. The book was very good overall, but if I were to try to piece together the plot meticulously, I'd still be baffled. Since I've chosen instead to focus on the themes presented in the novel and the moments of breathtaking writing in it, I'm mostly just happy I finished it. As I am wont to do with nearly everything I read, I dog-eared the pages containing lines that made me swoon as I read. Unfortunately, since I never underline or highlight said lines, I have to search for them on the dog-eared pages after I read the book and blog about it. So the following are (hopefully) my absolute favorite quotations from this book:

"...but even when she said it she was thinking how much her eyes enjoyed looking in his face." (46)

"She shook her head from side to side, resigned to her rebellious brain. Why was there nothing it refused? No misery, no regret, no hateful picture too rotten to accept? Like a greedy child it snatched everything. Just once, could it say, No thank you? I just ate and can't hold another bite?...But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day." (70)

"He sat down beside her. Sethe looked at him. In that unlit daylight his face, bronzed and reduced to its bones, smoothed her heart down." (71) I lovelove the cadences created by the first two short sentences, and then the concept of a face smoothing someone's heart down, the same way I love the concept of eyes enjoying looking at a face. The idea that beauty can be comprehended severally by your senses and not just in a lump experience by your brain.

"Sethe rubbed and rubbed, pressing the work cloth and the stony curves that made up his knee. She hoped it calmed him as it did her. Like kneading bread...Working dough. Working, working dough. Nothing better than that to start the day's serious work of beating back the past." (73) This excerpt ended a chapter. An ending like that--it just makes me go "mm."

"...she wanted Paul D. No matter what he told and knew, she wanted him in her life....Trust and rememory, yes, the way she believed it could be when he cradled her before the cooking stove. The weight and angle of him; the true-to-life beard hair on him; arched back, educated hands. His waiting eyes and awful human power. The mind of him that knew her own. Her story was bearable because it was his as well--to tell, to refine and tell again. The things neither knew about the other--the things neither had word-shapes for--well, it would come in time..." (99) What a fantastic description of the things one can love about a man, and the way lovers can begin to occupy spaces in one another's lives.

"I'll plant carrots just so she can see them, and turnips. Have you ever seen one, baby? A prettier thing God never made. White and purple with a tender tail and a hard head. Feels good when you hold it in your hand and smells like the creek when it floods, bitter but happy." (201) Who else could write so evocatively about a turnip, for goodness' sake! This excerpt makes me want to hold one, see one, smell one, so much.

"There are too many things to feel about this woman. His head hurts. Suddenly he remembers Sixo trying to describe what he felt about the Thirty-Mile Woman. 'She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.'" (272-273) I so desperately want to be described this way one day, as a woman about whom there is too much to feel, a woman who can gather a man's (or anyone's, for that matter) pieces and give them back in the right order. Mm.

"He wants to put his story next to hers." (273) Again, an amazing way to conceptualize (ugh this is not the right term; where is all my language gone?) love and marriage--putting your stories together.

NOTE: Boldface and italics were added by me, and were not in the original text.