I really like Rebecca Wells' writing. It is funny but also very deep, and even when she writes in dialogue it still flows very nicely. It was rougher to read than "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood" and made me question why the children still talk to the mother at all. "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood" is also a lot more cohesive but for a first novel, this was pretty good.
This book gives a lot more background to the Walker family. It's so scary to see how much the parents would drink and how they could just drive all over the place with no repercussions. What a nightmare.

This book is worth reading. I like all the child characters and the maid, Willetta. I find it has some interesting metaphors. For example, the characters try to fix their deeply sad and disturbed psyches with obsessive religious rituals and pills and alcohol throughout the story, and then it casually mentions that at the same time they were chasing DDT trucks and covering themselves in this dangerous poison to keep the bugs away. I like that book is written from the point of views of many different characters. The changing view point not only kept my attention but it also showed how differently different people can be affected by the same situation. Even each child in the Walker family naturally has a different take on growing up in this atmosphere. It is also interesting to see each character speaking through their own cultural perspective. Each character has an individual voice, but they also go through the perspectives of black, white, Catholic, Baptist, male, female, child, adult, rich, and poor. I find the book well-written and thoughtful. I found very little of it funny though. It doesn't need to be funny to be a good book. However, I have noticed that it has been described that way and I would not recommend it to anyone who is just looking for a laugh, even with a dark sense of humor. The book is horribly sad in many places, and I do not find the character Vivi to be remotely likable or sympathetic. In fact, I find her downright evil and think that reconciling with her is not in Siddalee's best interest. She sort of approaches the reader the way she does her children, trying to force them to accept all the horrible things she says and does with a mixture of charm and self pity. Again, this doesn't mean the book is bad, just that some of the promotions are misleading.

I'd heard a lot about this author's other book, "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood," so I grabbed this immediately when I found it in one of my little neighborhood libraries on the side of the street. I guess I can see why some people like this type of writing, but I found the whole thing almost too painful to read. The story is told by a series of first-person narrators: Siddalee Walker, her siblings, parents and the family's black servants, but it's really not a story, in the true sense. The main character, Sidda, grows up and looks back at a traumatic childhood that we are all too familiar with by the end of the book, but nothing much happens except that we learn more and more what it's like to be a child of two alcoholics.

The voices in this book definitely seem authentic at first, but I began to feel like they were all caricatures and way too stereotyped, particularly the loving "black mammy" that is the only true mother figure for these poor kids. It may all be very much the way Louisiana is (or was) but it's painful to see such casual racism on display.

The book was published in 1992 and seems true to that time period when women our age (and it looks like I'm about the same age as this author) were trying to come to grips with our childhoods -- but I really didn't want to revisit all that, even if it wasn't my own story. Other people may find it more palatable, though.

I picked up this book due to the fame of the Ya-Ya's, and it sounded promising with claims for multiple viewpoints telling the story, a Southern mentality and culture, and humor.

It didn't take long to start disliking it, which surprised me.

This wasn't due to the author's skill- this was due to the terrible characters in the Walker family.

There is an alcoholic father who is abusive, a similarly addicted mother who is selfish like it's going out of style and is cruel to her children, and several children who grow up severely warped in consequence.

There were precious few lighthearted moments of humor taking place in this scenario. There is an attempt at grownup children coming to terms with their perverse childhoods, but it just didn't redeem the story from being awful and depressing to me.

There is some good commentary about race relations and meaningful human values expressed through the black characters, thankfully, but the main story was all about dysfunctionality and damage.

Enjoy!

This book hurts so good. I LOVED it. In fact, I only gave it 4 stars because of the way the book jumps back and forward through time and between the characters. I found myself getting confused.

Every character has a tragic backstory, but the kids do give you hope at the end. They all cope in their own ways, but they all made it. They aren’t continuing the cycle of abuse, and that is something that deserves celebration. Ms. Wells does her best to endear you to these flawed characters, even after they do unforgivable things and break your heart again and again. I’m grateful that she saw fit to include a few chapters that remind us that no matter what, life goes on. And so do we.

The description is excellent. I hardly had to use my imagination to dream up what the characters must have looked like and how those humid summers with the mosquitoes eating you alive must have felt like (although I didn’t have to use much imagination for that last part—I grew up in Memphis, TN).

But the one line that I keep coming back to; “Don’t hit the baby.” Here Ms. Wells dives right into the heart of things. Some characters learn this eventually, others are still striving. All of the ups and downs we witnessed, all the hurt we endured on behalf of these characters wasn’t for naught. We can close the book with some semblance of closure. And carry this little piece of hope not just for the characters, but for ourselves.

I read this book first (even though I think it's actually the second book in the series) because it gave a sort of history of Vivianne and Big Shep Walker. I didn't like the style in which it was written, but I did like the story. I also didn't like the molestation that was portrayed but I am curious about the psychological aspect of it - from both the children's point of views as well as the mother's. Why did she do it? Was she, too, molested as a child or was she just that sick in her drunken stupor that she thought it was okay?

I would say for those that want to read it, take caution. There are triggers in this book.

I got really caught up in this book, whose varying narrations keep the story moving forward (literally) from different viewpoints. I’ve read some books where this approach was a pain or gimmicky; it didn’t feel that way here.

I haven’t read any of the other Ya-Ya books yet, but now I want to. I will say, though, as good as the book is to read, it’s painful to experience as an empath. The central family is dysfunctional to the max, and the mother is an abusive narcissist. So I have mixed feelings: I highly recommend the novel as literature, but will add a content warning because of the world the author writes about.

Wow. This book is excellent, but having read Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, I'm dumbfounded at how this can be about the same characters. Granted, I read Divine Secrets when it was first published, so don't remember it verbatim, but I remember the mother, Vivi, being a much more benign character in that book. She did have a mental breakdown that caused her to severely beat her children on one occasion, but she definitely was not sexually abusing at least one and possibly all of her four children. So, I am *really* curious as to what caused the differences in the two books and what actually happened in Rebecca Wells' family. I read some interviews with her, and while she at first denied the books were autobiographical, she now says that they were based on her family. So I'm wondering if the rift between Sidda, her mother, and three of her siblings in Divine Secrets is actually based on what happened in the Wells family after the publication of Little Altars. Or maybe being Little Altars was only a modest success, the publisher urged her to write the second book with a lighter, more comedic touch? I did a little internet sleuthing and found that Wells' parents were Chester and Margaret Wells of Alexandria, LA. Chester died in 2001 in his 70s but Margaret lived to be almost 90, dying in 2017. There were four children, just as in the book: Rebecca (Sidda), Chester Jr. (Little Shep), Anna (Lulu) and Thomas (Baylor). Interesting how the real names are much more conventional. But Rebecca is a playwright and director, just like Sidda, and Thomas is a lawyer in Alexandria, like Baylor.

This book is more of a collection of connected short stories than a novel, each told from a different character's point of view. They seem to have perhaps been written at different times. "Skinny Dipping" is the one most like the characters and plot of Divine Secrets, with the Ya-yas and their kids all together having fun during a summer at a lake cabin. In "Animal Cruelty", the grandma, Buggy, is a harmless, eccentric old lady, not the hateful mother who accused her daughter of incest with her father in Divine Secrets. Maybe Wells took that part of her mother's personality and assigned it to her grandmother in Divine Secrets? Or maybe Wells' mother was abused by her father and then in turn grew up to abuse her own children? Vivi is also cruel to an unpopular girl in Sidda's Girl Scout troop in "Wilderness Training." Definitely not like the woman in Divine Secrets who bought countless makeup kits from a door-to-door saleswoman in order to help her out. Sister Lulu gets just one chapter in Little Altars--I would have liked to know more about her and may have to reread Divine Secrets to see if it's mentioned how she turns out.

I haven't read the third book of the trilogy, "Ya-yas in Bloom," but most of the reviews said it wasn't even close to the quality of the first two, so not sure I want to bother. But I'll be thinking of this one--and how close it is or isn't to actual fact--for a long time.

I would probably actually give this a 3.5 but I decided to round up. Rebecca Wells is such a vivid writer that, as I read this book, I felt totally immersed in a time period and a culture that I really have no connection to. It is this richness and, more importantly, grounded reality, that make Little Altars Everywhere so delightful to read. Certainly there is darkness and despair explored in this book -- that does not mean it is a bad story. I have to say, the revelation that Viviane molested her children was shocking, but the people who say that ruined the character after reading Divine Secrets must have missed something the first time around, because Vivi has never been someone to look up to or admire. She is entertaining and bemusing, to be sure, but no heroine. It's hard to describe what it is exactly I liked about this book (and loved about Divine Secrets) except to say that it just touches me. It fills me with a longing for a time and place that will never exist again.

I read Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood a couple of years ago and it didn't leave a huge impression on me so I'm not upset about learning negative things about the characters in this one- that's how people are. Even people you think are great can be abusers. It's how they get away with the abuse.

It's good if you want to read about intergenerational relationships of southern white women in the second half of the 20th century. I know this book started as a short story and I'm curious what event in the book that short story was based on. I think the book is generally realistic in how alcoholism affects families.

I listened to the audiobook via Hoopla.

This book is not for everyone and may offend certain people. I have to say that the way the white characters acted, said certain things were realistic in that time period. The same things for the black people. It was interesting to hear it. That being said Vivian is a terrible wife and mother and affected her children and husband with her drinking and attitude. She said she likes fun and was born at not the right time period. This is probably accurate because it was not the way in the 60's in the south. Her husband had some real tender moments and I felt like he cared about the children. I got the impression that Vivi probably preferred not be a mother and did not get any warm fuzxies. There black workers were awesome characters in how they felt and what they said. Real, genuine people who loved all the walker children and had to put Vivi in her place. I loved both of their recollection of their lives. I loved when she said. Don't be such a titty baby. She had a lot of excellent quotes that are applicable to today. This book will give u some glimpse into this time period in the south but it also will piss u off and make u realize no race is better than the other because Vivi is not a nice white woman to anyone but herself and maybe the yayas and she feels entitled. Even at the end talking to sidalee and telling her she was not happy at what she did at the baptism video she was taking. The ending is still unsettling.

Rebecca Wells is a writing chameleon, a shape-changer like blessed few other writers can manage. She creates the world of Thornton, Louisiana by story-telling through the eyes of eight different characters. Each voice is distinct and exquisitely crafted with a unique and individual personality. And yet, the plot is in no way fractured by the various viewpoints of the action. It is the story of all the love, violence, anger, resentment, ugliness, and beauty that takes a family of six from 1963 to 1991, from childhood to adulthood, from ignorance and pain, to grudging maturity and acceptance. I can't begin to recount the story without spoiling it for you. It is the story of Siddalee Walker and her family as they grow up on Pecan Grove cotton plantation. And it is a marvelous kaleidoscopic picture of the difficulties and complexities of living life and learning wisdom the way they used to do in Louisiana. Wells makes me laugh and makes me cry going back and forth between emotions in the space of a few pages. You know, the way brilliant authors usually do. I recommend you read this book. I loved it, and if you love reading too, you will not be disappointed.