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Ya Yas #2

Little Altars Everywhere

rebecca wells

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Little Altars Everywhere is a national best-seller, a companion to Rebecca Wells' celebrated novel Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Originally published in 1992, Little Altars introduces Sidda, Vivi, the rest of the spirited Walker clan, and the indomitable Ya-Yas.

Told in alternating voices of Vivi and her husband, Big Shep, along with Sidda, her siblings Little Shep, Lulu, Baylor, and Cheney and Willetta — the black couple who impact the Walkers' lives in ways they never fully comprehend — Little Altars embraces nearly thirty years of life on the plantation in Thorton, Louisiana, where the cloying air of the bayou and a web of family secrets at once shelter, trap and define an utterly original community of souls.

Who can resist such cadences of Sidda Walker and her flamboyant, secretive mother, ViVi? Here the young Sidda — a precocious reader and an eloquent observer of the fault lines that divide her family — leads us on a mischievous adventures at Our Lady of Divine Compassion parochial school and beyond. A Catholic girl of pristine manners, devotion, and provocative ideas, Sidda is the very essence of childhood joy and sorrow.

In a series of luminous reminiscences, we also hear Little Shep's stories of his eccentric grandmother, Lulu's matter-of-fact account of her shoplifting skills, and Baylor's memories of Vivi and her friends, the Ya-Yas.

Beneath the humor and tight-knit bonds of family and friendship lie the undercurrents of alcoholism, abuse, and violence. The overlapping recollections of how the Walkers' charming life uncoils to convey their heart-breaking confusion are oat once unsettling and familiar. Wells creates an unforgettable portrait of the eccentric cast of characters and exposes their poignant and funny attempts to keep reality at arm's length. Through our laughter we feel their inevitable pain, with a glimmer of hope for forgiveness and healing.

An arresting combination of colloquialism, poetry, and grace, Little Altars Everywhere is an insightful, piercing and unflinching evocation of childhood, a loving tribute to the transformative power of faith, and a thoroughly fresh chronicle of a family that is as haunted as it is blessed.

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,1992
Series
Ya Yas
Places
the united states of america, 

This edition

Format
288 pages, Paperback
Published
February 15, 2005 by Harper Perennial
ISBN
9780060759964
ASIN
0060759968
Language
English

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About the author

Profile Image for rebecca wells

rebecca wells

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Rebecca Wells was born and raised in Alexandria, Louisiana. “I grew up,” she says, “in the fertile world of story-telling, filled with flamboyance, flirting, futility, and fear.” Surrounded by Louisiana raconteurs, a large extended family, and Our Lady of Prompt Succor's Parish, Rebecca's imagination was stimulated at every turn. Early on, she fell in love with thinking up and acting in plays for her siblings—the beginnings of her career as an actress and writer for the stage. She recalls her early influences as being the land around her, harvest times, craw-fishing in the bayou, practicing piano after school, dancing with her mother and brothers and sister, and the close relationship to her black “mother” who cleaned for the Wells household. She counts black music and culture from Louisiana as something that will stay in her body's memory forever.

In high school, she read Walt Whitman's “I Sing the Body Electric,” which opened her up to the idea that everything in life is a poem, and that, as she says, “We are not born separately from one another.” She also read “Howl,” Allen Ginsberg's indictment of the strangling consumer-driven American culture he saw around him. Acting in school and summer youth theater productions freed Rebecca to step out of the social hierarchies of high school and into the joys of walking inside another character and living in another world.

The day after she graduated from high school, Rebecca left for Yellowstone National Park, where she worked as a waitress. It was an introduction to the natural glories of the park—mountains, waterfalls, hot springs, and geysers—as well as to the art of hitchhiking.

Rebecca graduated from Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge, where she studied theater, English, and psychology. She performed in many college plays, but also stepped outside the theater department to become awakened to women's politics. During this time she worked as a cocktail waitress--once accidentally kicking a man in the shins when he slipped a ten-dollar bill down the front of her dress—and began keeping a journal after reading Anais Nin, which she has done ever since.

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Community Reviews

Rating(4 / 5.0, 99 votes)
5 stars
38(38%)
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99 reviews All reviews
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derpykitty
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Not as good as "Ya-Ya", but yikes! Vivi is a child molester? Yuck!!! I actually couldn't believe reading that chapter - it's as if Rebecca Wells got tired of creating this amazing whirlwind of a character and decided that she had to have a truly evil center. For me, it's like Wells burned down the barn...
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sodiumfluoride
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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After 100 pages I had to give up on this. Maybe I have a beef with stories about dysfunctional Southern families. No, that's not true. I love Flannery O'Connor. And anyone who perused my book list knows I do not shy away from the darker aspects of life...or from very dark comedies, which I think this is trying to be. Yet Wells seems to think there is something warm and funny about abuse and molestation. The scatter-shot styling of writing and alternating viewpoints dd not help at all to bring any organization or meaning to this tale. I know a number of people who loved Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood but I doubt this "prequel" is adds anything. Perhaps I should try the other book but I'm afraid Little Altars Everywhere has scared me off of Rebecca Wells' novels for good.
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ClayP
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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If you enjoyed To Kill a Mockingbird and Secret Life of Bees, you will also enjoy this first novel from Rebecca Wells. For some reason, I have a thing for Southern lit about innocent children and their adventures
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Lathaw
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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This book reinforces the marginalization of its marginalized characters. The black narrators function only as witnesses to the white characters. They have no development outside of their perspectives on and reactions to their white employers. Also, the chapters written in the voice of black characters are in dialect, but the chapters written in the voice of rural white Louisianians are not...Willetta (the black domestic worker) doesn’t pronounce her “-ings” but Viviane does? Please. I don’t mind dialect writing, but when it is only used for black characters in a setting where everyone has an accent, it just communicates otherness.

Also, the tone of the book is very weird. Truly disturbing things happen, which is not a problem in itself, BUT it is not clear that the book realizes how disturbing those things are. The end felt way too sweet and easy for the heavy content the narrative introduces.

I will say, some of the sections are very good when read as short stories. Some striking imagery that will stick with me. I particularly loved “Catfish Dreams.”
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Emnic
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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3.5 Stars. This sequel gives you more insight into what went on from multiple POV’s
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_Wolfram
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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I think one of the reasons I like this book is because it provides a sense of realism compared to the fluff in the YaYa book. For all those women that believe they are only capable of mentally digesting useless chick lit, and they blindly read books by their favorite chick lit authors-I'm sure they hated this book with a passion. Our world is not a Disney cartoon, and there are plenty of people that have addictions, and that consciously emotionally/physically/sexually exploit and abuse others. These characters, although very scarey at times, are really believable.

Oh yeah, her writing ability is quite amazing too...
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aiji_hotaru
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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I almost want to say there is something Proustian about this novel except while I don't fear intellectual eye-rolling over my calling a popular novel written by and about southern women Proustian, I do fear eye-rolling over not quite correct use of the word. What I mean, then, is reading this novel was a gorgeously vivid sensory experience. When the Walker kids went to swim in the pond, I saw and felt and smelled it like I was in that same summertime water. I felt the cool concrete floors of the grocery store beneath my 10 year old feet. I experienced the vertiginous but exhilarating displacement of wandering through the house of a dimly known adult my parents were visiting looking for food, places to play, and random objects to pick up and examine all the while wondering, "Am I allowed to be in this room?"

All of this sensory overload sits on the surface of this loose collection of stories about the Walker clan of Thornton, Louisiana (a prequel of sorts to Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood however they can be read in any order.) However, as you read you begin to see the darkness below the surface troubling the waters. Siddha is oddly obsessed with religion and suffering. Lulu pulls out her hair and eats it. Baylor has trouble chewing and swallowing his food. Their mother, Vivi, sure drinks a lot and by the first time someone mentions her hands shaking in the morning, you know.

As the story flashes forward midway through from the 60's to the 90's and expands to include the Walker's hired help, the picture grows clearer and darker. And yet even as unlikable as some characters in the book are, you still feel empathy for them even when you can't forgive their behavior. As a case in point, the final story narrated by Vivi, "Looking for My Mules", made me connect and feel sorry for her even when I should have been saying, "Bitch you brought this on yourself." There's a lot of deceptive depth to this kind of writing. And the story is really about much more than just one family's troubles: small town politics, the death of the rural way of life, war, the burden of secrets.

The final chapter belongs to Siddha and is a great way to wrap up the story although I wanted to keep going (too bad the reviews of YaYa's in Bloom are all so negative.) Don't hit the baby. Fine advice, indeed.
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MomoiAisuki
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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After loving every second of DSoftheYYS, I was surprised to find that whole minutes of this novel left me queasy. I don't mind heavy emotional lifting, but this was heavy and twisted. If only I had had some warning that this companion story was of a completely different mood/genre/vein, maybe I could rate it higher. But my nausea won't let me.

I do remember a friend warning me not to read it. She said the book was a downer. But as I said, I enjoy good stories even if they aren't all tra la la (Anna Karenina, Snowflower and the Fan, East of Eden, Grapes of Wrath, Hamlet, etc etc), so I thought she was protecting what she thought was my expectation of a sunny sequel. I don't need sunny sequels. I knew Vivi was off kilter. I just wasn't prepared for how very off. Read with some Pepto Bismal at hand.
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