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...

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.

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

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.”

3.5 Stars. This sequel gives you more insight into what went on from multiple POV’s

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...

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.

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.

Another book I bought on my recent trip, this time from the library sale shelves. I had never read the author's other book, and I had never seen the movie made from it, but somehow this book intrigued me when I saw it.

Little Altars Everywhere was the author's first book. Originally published in 1992, this edition came out in 1996, after her Divine Secrets. So this technically is not #2 as GR lists it. And I don't think it should be called a prequel, either, since those usually seem to be written after some big hit, to explain more of the background. But this was written before the big hit and got reprinted by a larger publisher to capitalize on that big hit.

I tried to like Siddalee, but I just couldn't. I kept comparing her to another fictional character from a wonderful book by Fannie Flagg, Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man. I knew the situations were different, the stories wee different, but I guess I simply expected a Daisy Fay and not a Siddalee. I was bored right away, and that is never a good sign.

The quitting point came early, in the third of these stories (the book is more a loose collection of stories rather than a novel). This one is called Wandering Eye and is told by Siddalee's brother Shep, who talks about his relationship with his father, who hit him upside the head all the time. I had to quit when I reached the day Shep left a tractor out of the shed and his father proceeded to knock Shep's teeth loose, 'bust' him in the eye, and most likely broke a rib as well. The boy's mom was on the porch and just watched it happen, getting up at one point to say 'enough', but then retreating under threats of the same thing happening to her.

I don't need to read this type of thing right now. I understand it happens, I understand that pain is essential to the story, etc etc. But no, this chapter turned my stomach and I refuse to read another word.

DNF at page 28.

I don't care if it's fluffy chick lit/"look at my dysfunctional family" memoir trash, I still love these characters.

"You can't go anywhere with Mama without things getting nuts. If it's going along too smooth she will invent something just to stir things up. Sometimes we'll be downtown shopping and everything's going normal, and Mama will put her fingers in her mouth and let out the loudest, most piercing whistle you ever heard in your life. Then everyone gets startled and drops what they're doing and looks around to see where the noise came from. And Mama, she'll just bend over and pretend to be looking at a pair of shoes."

"Buggy is terrified of big organizations. She says they're all in cahoots with each other. For instance, she thinks the Communists have infiltrated the NASA space program to ruin the weather so they can destroy the Catholic church. Every time we have a hurricane, she says, See, what did Buggy tell yall?"

I liked this one a lot more than I did ‘The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood’ and really wish I’d read this first. That’s what I get for trusting Goodreads’ reading order instead of reading the books in publication order.

Saying that, if I had read this one first, I think I’d’ve rated TDSOTYYS even lower than the three stars I did give it, as it attempts to airbrush out some of the more horrible aspects of some of the characters revealed in this first book, in its attempt to idealise (I’m tempted to say ‘fetishise’) the Ya-Yas.

This book is terrible. While it is interesting to see more of the lives of the characters of Divine Secrets this book just jumps around and doesn't have the main storyline to hold the various stories together, or make us care about what we are reading.





As a note don't take less than 5 minutes to tell us that the main character is a child molester if you a) don't plan on ever talking about it again and b) want us to like her through the rest of the series.