Wells is a Louisiana-born Seattle actress and playwright; her loopy saga of a 40-year-old player in Seattle's hot theater scene who must come to terms with her mama's past in steamy Thornton City, Louisiana, reads like a lengthy episode of Designing Women written under the influence of mint juleps and Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!. The Ya-Yas are the wild circle of girls who swirl around the narrator Siddalee's mama, Vivi, whose vivid voice is "part Scarlett, part Katharine Hepburn, part Tallulah." The Ya-Yas broke the no-booze rule at the cotillion, skinny-dipped their way to jail in the town water tower, disrupted the Shirley Temple look-alike contest, and bonded for life because, as one says, "It's so much fun being a bad girl!"

Siddalee must repair her busted relationship with Vivi by reading a half-century's worth of letters and clippings contained in the Ya-Ya Sisterhood's packet of "Divine Secrets." It's a contrived premise, but the secrets are really fun to learn.


Amazon.com Audiobook Review
Performed, not read, by the author is the key here. This highly spirited interpretation of the cult classic is, like the book, full of humor and surprises. It captures with ease the powerful lifelong friendship between four Southern women, the Ya-Ya's: Vivi, Teensy, Caro, and Necie. The author endows each of her charming characters with an inimitable Southern accent, from a low rumble for the aging oxygen-tank-carrying Caro, to the fresh innocent voice of Vivi as a child. The story moves back and forth from present to past when Vivi's daughter, Sidda, is faced with a crisis and is given the golden opportunity to explore the history of these devoted pals through her mother's secret scrapbook. Her journey is sprinkled with her own memories of her irrepressible and irresistible mother, and she is rewarded with glimpses of true love and loyalty against an often hilarious and poignant backdrop of life in the rural South.

Some favorite scenes, anecdotes, and the rich bayou background are not included on this abridged audiocassette, but fans of this special sisterhood will nonetheless enjoy listening to the author's take on the world of Thornton, Louisiana, and the female friendships she created there. (Running time: 3 hours, 2 cassettes) --Anne Depue


From Publishers Weekly
Veteran narrator Ivey is magnificent in her performance of Wells's sprawling, delicious novel of lifelong female friendship and mother-daughter tension and reconciliation. When Siddalee Walker, a successful theater director, accidentally lets slip in an interview some less-than-flattering truths about her mother, Vivi, the ever-dramatic Vivi declares "You are dead to me!" But when Sidda reads Vivi's scrapbook detailing seven decades of friendship with her lifelong pals, the irrepressible Ya-Yas, she begins to understand her vivacious, unconventional, often difficult but never boring mother in ways she never has before. Ivey creates distinctive voices for each one of the multitude of characters not an easy task, since most of them are female and Southern. There's the four Ya-Yas, both as young, giggly girls and then as elderly women; Sidda as a child and a woman; and a plethora of relatives, siblings and friends. Ivey performs each character with conviction and emotion. Through her performance, listeners can see the characters, colorful events and the tangle and friction of close-knit, complicated relationships. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
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, LJ 7/92) 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 Ctr. for the Book, SeattleCopyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Washington Post
"A very entertaining and, ultimately, deeply moving novel about the complex bonds between mother and daughter."


From AudioFile
The joys, battles, struggles, and successes of several Louisiana women, the "Ya-Yas," are celebrated in this wildly popular novel. It's an often funny book full of Southern-tinged angst about the relationships between women, and between that most complex of women's relationship: mother and daughter. Tony award winner Judith Ivey takes palpable pleasure in the chance to portray free-spirited Southern women. She gives full measure to these self-dramatizing women, providing voices that range from honeyed New Orleans French to cigarette-and-bourbon hoarse. The characters she inhabits include everyone from the gentlest lady to the toughest broad. It's an amazing performance. A.C.S. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
A powerfully literate yet thoroughly engaging and accessible novel, this story of a close-knit society of southern women has become a modern cult classic bolstered by author Rebecca Wells's abiltity to transcend standard-issue chick lit with bold and unique characters and a tale that digs deeply into the complex bonds of family.

The entangled story of actress Siddalee Walker, her mother Vivi, and Vivi's group of pals -- the Ya-Yas -- gets off to a heated start when Sidda's disparaging remarks about her mother run in the New York Times. Vivi declares all-out war and immediately cuts Sidda out of her will, pushes a libel suit, and forbids the other septuagenarian Ya-Ya's to speak to Sidda ever again. Convinced she doesn't "know how to love," a shaken Sidda postpones her upcoming wedding and flees to a remote Washington cabin. Suddenly concerned about her daughter, Vivi convenes an emergency Ya-Ya council and at last decides to reveal her jealously guarded past to Sidda through her treasured scrapbook, "The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood."

The scrapbook spans Ya-Ya history, documenting among other things the hilarious Shirley Temple Look-Alike Contest that first united the four women in a conspiracy against polite society; the secret history and initiation rites of the group; a trip to Atlanta to attend the premier of Gone With The Wind; and Vivi's first and greatest love. It also sheds light on Vivi's reaction to the constraints of motherhood and the alcoholism, self-medication, and spiritual confusion that eventually led to a complete nervous breakdown. Also buried in the book is the key that unlocks Sidda's childhood memory of a lost lesson of love and brings her to a new understanding of her family's shared triumphs and tragedies.

Much more universal in its appeal than the "women's book" some reviewers have been tempted to call it (according to Wells, "It's a book for women -- and smart men"), The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood manages with passion, humor, and an irrepressible gift for language to somehow show readers of all backgrounds a mirror-perfect reflection of their own life experiences. (Greg Marrs)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

When Vivi and Siddalee Walker, an unforgettable mother-daughter team, get into a savage fight over a New York Times article that refers to Vivi as a 'tap-dancing child abuser,' the Ya-Yas, sashay in and conspire to bring everyone back together. In 1932, Vivi and the Ya-Yas were disqualified from a Shirley Temple Look-Alike Contest for unladylike behavior. Sixty years later, they're 'bucking 70' and still making waves. With passion and a rare gift for language, Rebecca Wells moves from present to past, unraveling Vivi's life, her enduring friendships with the Ya-Yas, and the reverberations on Siddalee. The collective power of the Ya-Yas, each of them totally individual and authentic, permeates this story of a tribe of Louisiana wild women who are impossible to tame.

FROM THE CRITICS

Washington Post

A very entertaining and, ultimately, deeply moving novel about the complex bonds between mother and daughter.

Portland Oregonian

An insightful, delicious novel.

Columbus Dispatch

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.

New Orleans Times-Picayune

. . .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.

Oregonian

An insightful, delicious novel. Read all 18 "From The Critics" >

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