Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood : A Novel

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Summary: Ya - Ya 's --- please drown the dog!
Review: Because I am a woman, raised in the South, and a Catholic I am absolutely disgusted by the mindless drivel I have just read in this book. Not only are the characters irresponsible, self-centered lushes, it seems that all of them have someone in their past to blame for all of their problems. On top of trying to deal with all the emotional garbage of these shallow characters, there is Hueylene the dog. The presence of this dog in the book did nothing but aggravate the reader. I think it would have improved slightly if the Ya-Yas had drowned the dog in the drinking water when they went for their famous swim!

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Summary: The Divine Secrets of the YA-YA Sisterhood
Review: The Divine Secrets of the YA-YA Sisterhood is a great book for mothers and daughters. The book deals with love and friendship with a good dose of humor and a southern twang. The book grabs your attention in the first few pages and you become so involved in the lives of the characters that you don't want the book to end. A mother and daughter are torn apart by a newspaper acticle and it takes the humorous, wacky, and always loving YA-YAS to bring the two together again. The YA-YAS come to visit the Siddalee, an up and coming director, and together with the scrapbook of their past, they piece together the life of her mother and Siddalee begins to see who she really is. Siddalee and her mother, Vivi, come to understand each other and gain a new respect for one another. The book brings out all your emotions, it will make you laugh to see the YA-YAS bathing in the watertower, and it will make you cry when you see treatment of Vivi and Siddlee when they were children. The book leaves you with a feeling of satisfaction and is defininitely worth reading more than once.

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Summary: What a fun book
Review: This is one of those books that you get lost in. Rebecca Wells takes you inside a place and a life that is so deep within the imagination that one can hardly believe that it could possibly exist. The book is at times so funny you just can't stop smiling, and at other times so sad that you pray you don't run out of tissues. It is a great read and I recommend it to anyone looking to get lost in a book.

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Summary: Incredible, Fabulous and SOOO Entertaining
Review: I love this book! Rebecca Wells writes so poetically and prophetically. We are all mad at our families. We all have huge, scary skeletons in our closet. Rebecca gives those skeketons a voice and a soul. She gives answers and insights and beauty to everything the average American family is so frightened of talking about. She also shares a story of friendship that makes me so envious. I wish I had a group of friends or even just one to go through life's turmoils and triumphs with. This story is so beautiful. I am begging you all to read it. Do you have a heart? Do have any fears? Do you have any secrets? Do you have any stories? If you answered yes to any of these questions then it is your duty, but more importantly your right to read this book. Give yourself up to it. I promise you won't be disappointed.

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Summary: Entertaining certainly, but get it at the library!
Review: I found the book to be entertaining, but was puzzled about the self-absorbed Siddah who at 40 seemed never to have thought about simply talking to her mother about her childhood problems. The Ya Yas themselves, including Siddah's mother, Vivi, were goofy, one-dimensional characters. The storyline switching back and forth was interesting, but much of the story is unknown to Siddah, so how she is able to resolve the problem with her mother at the end of the book was a big mystery to me. So many unresolved questions that the message about forgiveness was totally muddled.

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Summary: Scarlett O'hare meets Eugene O'neil
Review: Acutally, I though Wells did a pretty good job but my rating is colored by the clueless responses many of the books readers seem to have had. If I was rating this just for the colorful language (yes, a lot of it reminded me of my own Southern childhood) and the superficial message of loyalty, friendship, and fun, I'd probably have been more generous with my stars. As it is, though, I can't quite get beyond a rather profound disappointment that the women's group who shared it with me and, apparently, a lot of the other Amazon readers who reviewed the book found it inspiring and fun and "oh, didn't those Ya-ya's have it great!". Well, no. The Ya-ya's were four shallow drunks who, having once showed a modicum of spark, spunk and discontent at the soul crushing mediocrity of the social roles their mid-century Southern culture had in store for them, opted instead of transformation and resistance to anaethetize themselves with alcohol and sneaking cigarettes and distract themselves with a "no boys allowed" club, injokes, secret vocabulary, and decoder rings obligatory. The result is that one of the daughters of these fine matriarchs of disolution was left so bereft of positive models of adult relationships and so crippled in her own relationships with men that she almost opts out of making it with the love of her life. This is an inspiring, happy, feminist book only at a very surface reading. Just below, and to the core, a sad indictment of drug addled escapism, infantile rebelliousness glorified into adulthood, and a cautionary tale of the life devastating results of not standing up for the possibility of the life you REALLY want. I would recommend this only for those strong enough to wade through a lot of someone else's fetid emotional baggage or shallow enough to find drug addiction and borderline personality disorder to be, somehow, a charming romp through a happy childhood.

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Summary: An entertaining and delightful novel.
Review: Put up your feet, throw a warm afghan around you, and brew some hot chocolate, because this is a book you will sit with for a while. It's delightfully entertaining. The story flows quite magically, and the characters are funny and important all at once. Vivi is an insane kind of person, one who attaches herself to that little bit of insanity in all of us. She's fantastic in a very strong sort of way, and her daughter is off balance enough to make us love her. I enjoyed the sense of friendship and loyalty the author was able to portray, while maintaining enough flow in the story line to magnetically keep the reader involved. I gave this book 5 stars, there just seem to be so few books of this nature these days, ones that you can sit with and enjoy and that stay with you awhile.

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Summary: Divine Secrets of the YaYa Sisterhood
Review: A great book about friend

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Summary: Rebecca Wells' novel is an instant classic!
Review: Divine Secrets was a powerful book about the complexities between a mother and daughter. I loved this book. It was complex, insightful, funny, and poignant.

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Summary: Not worth it
Review: Barely worth the time to read. I skimmed. The frame of the story is weak and clearly constructed just for the sake of stringing together anecdotes about some lively women--I was bored by it pretty much from the get-go. The dialogue is stereotypical--the author tries too hard to make the characters say funny Southern things. While the idea of such a nurturing sisterhood is great, this book doesn't really dramatize a story about real people--it ascribes to an ideal and tells the reader about it. The jumping around between narrators is not controlled (nor explained nor justified) and therefore is distracting--you never know where the story is coming from. This might have been great stuff for a collection of essays, but not a novel.