So much better than I remembered it from 25 years ago. Reading this before revisiting The Ya-Ya Sisterhood is key…I’m diving into that one today.

Years and years ago, I read the first book to this “Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood”. I don’t remember much about it but that it was super sad and a lot of liquor flowed. This book is like the “darker” secrets of the first book. It delves more into the characters and how they think/actions. I read this in like 4 hours, it’s a short read but packs a punch to the gut. I know the Author was trying to give Viviene & Big Shep more of a voice for what they did. But it doesn’t excuse anything at all. In fact by the end of the book I felt so sad for their children and I despised the parents so much. I honestly felt like throwing the book into the trash when I was done reading. Donation pile it goes!

This book is a reread for me. I first read it at some point in my teenage years around the time the movie was released. I loved it then and I still love it now. It's the prequel to Divine Secrets of The Ya-Ya Sisterhood and it introduces us to the Walker family as well as Chaney and Willetta. I think that's why sometimes I like this book just a tiny bit better because you get to see everyone's POV where as in Divine it's more limited.

But lord this book it makes me happy and breaks my heart at the same time and I just still to this day relate so much to Siddalee and her life growing up in her family.

4.5
Loads better than the movie (which I love).
Incredible narrator!

This short story collection paints a vivid picture of Louisiana’s complex culture - religion, superstition, decadence, brutality, love, anger, and a beautiful landscape. It explains how the Deep South drops in anchor in your heart, even if you eventually leave.

It’s also a heartbreaking picture of siblings coping with an abusive childhood. Each develops their own hang ups into adulthood. Hearing from different family members’ perspectives gives a fuller picture of the clan’s dynamics, and how much they misunderstand one another.

The evil and hope in the story can be analogy for the Deep South itself. Should we just accept that Shep and Vivi didn’t know how to live any differently? Or can we challenge their actions and inherited status quo? The YaYa sequel is too forgiving; this is a better southern Gothic.

Didn’t love it. I’m glad I read Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood first. I read it many years ago, and it was good. I probably never would have read Ya-Ya if I had read this one first. Most of the characters are awful people. It also reads like a collection of short stories because each chapter is a different point of view, mainly of unrelated recollections from their childhood, I’m not a big fan of short stories for the most part.

Had I read this before the Ya-Ya's, I would have hated all of the characters and used both books for target practice. Litte Alters Everywhere exposes the true natures of the Ya-Ya's and makes the reader reconsider what they found so endearing about the Ya-Ya's in the first place.

Ok, so now Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood makes quite a bit more sense. Thanks to it becoming a movie (that I’ve never seen) I assumed the Ya-Ya book (that I read earlier) was a standalone so when I saw it I picked it up and read it. Oops. That was part two and Little Altars is part one. (There’s a third book that fits in there somewhere, but whatever). At first the alternating POV had me annoyed but it turned out to be a good way of telling everyone’s story. Vivi was definitely some sort of narcissist and a shit mom, but since I had read Ya-Ya, I got that her childhood was crazy shitty too (not that I’m forgiving the woman but it does explain a lot). Anyway, a good story. And a sad one too in that you could see this family at some point had so much potential to be happy but just couldn’t get there.

My favorite book series thus far!

I read this book back in the early 90’s when it was first published and totally loved it. I decided to read (listen to) it again and see if it was as good as I remembered. It was!

I’m irritated by reviewers who call this a book a sequel to Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. It’s not! This was the original book. Divine Secrets is the sequel. Many of these same readers don’t seem to like the heaviness of Little Altars Everywhere. I agree that this book deals with some dark themes, but I find Little Altars Everywhere to have much more depth and emotional power for this very reason. The book does include incredible humor. I found myself frequently laughing out loud. But in the next moment one’s heart is breaking at some of the tragic events and dysfunctional relationships. This combination of funny and heart-wrenching is what makes this such a powerful novel—-and Wells’s best in my opinion.

I listened to the audio read by Judith Ivey who does a great job giving voice to the different characters. I highly recommend it.

Divine Secrets of the YaYa Sisterhood is one of my favorite books/movies. I knew 'Little Altars' existed but didnt realize that is was a prequel. That said, I was distressed by a few chapters that mention things about ViVi that I didnt know. I wont mention them here. But now I wonder, knowing this, if I will see the characters differently if I reread/rewatch. I dont know if it will change anything, and Im glad that I read this. But I wont be rereading it

The blurb I read about this book billed it as a "novel" and said that it was "funny." Well, it's only funny in the sense, as one of the characters says, of "not funny ha-ha, but funny tired. Funny sad." The book is also more like a short story cycle than a novel. Characters and themes weave together throughout the collection, but each chapter is somewhat self-contained and there are large gaps in time. As such, there wasn't a lot of the sustained tension typically present in a novel, and so I was not compelled to keep reading, despite the fact that the writing itself was good. Whenever I finished a chapter, I thought, "that was well written and affecting," and yet I still didn't feel like I needed to read the next chapter. While I'm glad I read the book now that I'm done, I'm not entirely sure if I would have finished it had I not been reading it for a book club.

Flannery O'Connor once described the South as "Christ haunted," and there's an element of that in this book, particularly in the last chapter – that undercurrent of holy longing and those hints of redemption just beneath the surface of a darkly broken and fallen world. Rebecca Wells doesn't capture this as powerfully as the great Southern writers (O'Connor, Faulkner, etc.), but she toys with it. She gets it in bits and pieces, here and there, then loses it, then gets it again. I think in the end the whole God as "her" thing killed it a little bit for me. It's just hard to come off as literarily serious and Christ-haunted once you go there. Yes, I get that the narrator's mother was a mess and thus God-as-mother. But…eh…it just didn't work well for me. It was distracting. It took me a little bit out of the sad beauty just as I was finally going in to it.