"Saving CeeCee Honeycutt" & "Gilt by Association"

320 pages

From Booklist

Momma always told CeeCee (short for Cecelia Rose) that “being in the North isn’t living—it’s absolute hell.” Of course, having to live with Momma—Camille Sugarbaker Honeycutt, that is, Vidalia Onion Queen, 1951—doesn’t make it any more heavenly, especially when Momma starts standing in the front yard blowing kisses to passersby. You know this is going to end badly, and so it does, when the erstwhile onion queen is run over by a speeding Happy Cow Ice Cream Truck. Before you can say “sweet magnolia blossoms,” 12-year-old CeeCee is sent off to Savannah to live with her elderly great aunt, Tallulah Caldwell, and her wise African American housekeeper and cook, Oletta. It being 1967, you know there will be one dark episode of racial hatred, but it’s quickly—and conveniently—resolved offstage, leaving all the characters free to continue being relentlessly eccentric, upbeat, sweet as molasses, and living, as CeeCee puts it with a straight face, “in a breezy, flower-scented fairy tale . . . a strange, perfumed world that . . . seemed to be run entirely by women.” Light as air but thoroughly pleasant reading.

I really liked this book.
I don't know what else to say about it.
You should read it.
Told ya I wasn't a very good book reviewer! lol

256 pages

"......But a superb, gilt-edged 18th-century French armoire she purchased for a song at estate auction has just arrived along with something she didn't pay for: a dead body.

Suddenly her shop is a crime scene--and closed to the public during the busiest shopping season of the year--so Abigail is determined to speed the lumbering police investigation along. But amateur sleuthing is leading the feisty antiques expert into a murderous mess of dysfunctional family secrets. And the next cadaver found stuffed into fine old furniture could wind up being Abigail's own."

This was my bathtub book this week.
Yes, I have specific books for reading in the tub. Ha!
I have a Kindle, which I use for most of my books.
However, my nightly indulgence is a bubble bath and a book.
That's where PaperBackSwap.com comes in.
I use my credits to buy paperbacks for the bath. :-)

This is the second book in this series.
I have the same complaint about it as I did about the last one.
The language.
I don't like bad language in a book, especially when it seems to be used for no real reason.
I find the language in this book very unnecessary.

This is supposed to be in the "cozy mystery" genre.
I don't think it should be labeled as such.

The definition of a cozy is as follows:
"Cozies very rarely focus on sex, profanity,or violence. The murders take
place off stage, and are often relatively bloodless" (from Wikipedia).
(Click here for more on cozies).

Granted, this is still a mild book, but I would not label it a cozy.

My second complaint is that this is supposed to be a Southern novel.
Other than saying "ya'll" and various characters complaining about yankees (which I have NEVER heard a southerner seriously do), you would never know these characters are supposed to be from the south.
It's obvious that a non-southerner (dare I say, a yankee?) wrote this book.

All of that being said, I didn't hate the book.
It was an ok read.
To be fair, I loved the author's Penn-Dutch Inn series.

2010 total: 9
Currently Reading: "The Help", "Death of an Outsider" (Hamish MacBeth), and "The One Year Chronological Bible"