Mamaroneck reader Julie Salicrup begins her series of book reviews and recommendations for book clubs. And a list you won’t believe…
This week’s book is The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes by Diane Chamberlain
Chapel Hill, NC, the pastoral college town, is where we enter the life of CeeCee Wilkes. She is young and vulnerable but steadfast to her beliefs. CeeCee works as a waitress, itching to start her life, when she meets and falls in love with a mysterious graduate student. The choices she makes with him determines the course of her life.
After a single tragic event, the novel follows CeeCee for the next 30 years haunted by a single day in her past. We watch CeeCee mature from a youthful teenager to a responsible but tormented adult. As CeeCee’s life begins to align, her past surfaces and her fictitious existence begins to unravel.
This book will keep you hungry for each chapter. I found myself defending CeeCee’s choices with each character that entered her life. You don’t find out the fate of CeeCee until the very end but you will be glad you stuck with her.
I recommend this novel for book clubs. There are many moral and ethical dilemmas which could lend to thoughtful club discussions. Covering such topics as a missing child, the death penalty and an unsolved murder, this novel will make you ask yourself if CeeCee made the right decision and what would have been your choice?
Below is a list of books our book club has read:
The Magician’s Assistant
Sugar
Miss Understanding
Amy and Isabelle
Midwives
Jenna Jameson Autobiography – How to Make Love like a porn star
A Thousand Splendid Suns
The Wednesday Letters
The Book of Air and Shadows
The Namesake
Shattered Dreams: My Life as a Polygamist’s Wife
The Thirteenth Tale
Julia’s Chocolate
Middlesex
The Memory Keepers Daughter
The Year of Pleasures
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
You’re Not You
The Myth of You and Me
Disobedience
Abundance
The God of Animals
The Cure for Modern Life
The Queen of the South
The Whistling Season
Of Human Bondage
The Lace Reader
The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears
Time is a River
Testimony
Lima Nights
The Watchmen
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
The House on Mango Street
The Condition
I Capture the Castle
Same Kind of Different as Me
Three Junes
Puppet Child
Solstice
This is Where I Leave You
Dinner with Anna Karenina
The Likeness
Let the Great World Spin
The Broken Teaglass
Cutting For Stone
The Imperfectionists
13 Reasons Why
Very Valentine
Sima’s Undergarments for Women
Ham on Rye
The Madonna’s of Leningrad
The Wednesday Sisters
Room
A Week at the Airport
The Lock Artist
Running the Book: The Adventures of a Prison Librarian
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky
Reading Jackie – Her Autobiography in Books
Bringing out the Dead
Girl in Translation
Sister: A Novel
Breakfast at Tiffany’s: A short story and 3 stories
Miss New India
Enders Game
