Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (Wells)

Book Reviews
A very entertaining and, ultimately, deeply moving novel about the complex bonds between mother and daughter.
Carolyn See - Washington Post

Wells' voice is uniquely her own, funny and generous and full of love and heartbreak, in that grand Louisiana literary tradition of transforming family secrets into great stories.
New Orleans Time-Picayune

One heck of a rollicking good read...You'll laugh. You'll cry. But you'll mostly want to laugh and offer Wells a hearty merci.
Columbus Dispatch

Carrying echoes of both Fannie Flagg and Pat Conroy, Wells's second novel continues the story of Siddalee Walker, introduced in Little Altars Everywhere. When Sidda asks her mother, the aging belle Vivi, for help in researching women's friendships, Vivi sends her daughter a scrapbook. From this artifact of Vivi's own lifelong friendship with three women collectively known as 'the Ya-Ya's,' and from Sidda's response to it, a story unfolds regarding a dark period in Vivi and Sidda's past that plagues their present relationship. While anecdotes about the Ya-Ya's (such as the riotous scene at a Shirley Temple look-alike contest) are often very amusing, the narrative is beset by superficial characterization and forced colloquialisms. Told through several narrative vehicles and traveling through space and time from Depression-era Louisiana to present-day Seattle, this novel attempts to wed a folksy homespun tale to a soul-searching examination of conscience. But while Wells' ambition is admirable and her talent undeniable, she never quite makes this difficult marriage work.
Publishers Weekly

When a reporter uses upcoming theatrical director Siddalee Walker's description of her mother, Vivi, as a "tap-dancing child abuser," Vivi casts her daughter out of her life. Sidda, feeling unloved and unlovable, postpones her wedding and retreats to Washington State's Olympic Peninsula to try to understand why she cannot sustain emotional relationships. Vivi's three lifelong friends (known collectively as the "Ya-Yas") persuade her to send Sidda the scrapbook filled with mementos of Vivi's life in the small Central Louisiana town where she grew up, married, and raised her family. Paging through the scrapbook, Sidda begins to glimpse the dark shadows in her mother's life. The narrative deftly switches between first- and third-person viewpoints, from Vivi's past as revealed in the scrapbook to Sidda's childhood guilt about failing her mother. Wells (Little Altars Everywhere) demonstrates that with knowledge can come forgiveness. She has written an entertaining and engrossing novel filled with humor and heartbreak. Readers will envy Vivi her Ya-Ya "sisters" and Sidda, her lover, who is one of the most appealing men to be found in recent mainstream fiction. This entirely satisfactory novel belongs in public libraries of all sizes. — Nancy Pearl, Washington Center for the Book, Seattle.
Library Journal