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"Sidda is a girl again in the hot heart
of Louisiana, the bayou world of Catholic saints and voodoo queens. She
walks barefoot into the humid night, moonlight on her freckled
shoulders. Near a huge, live oak tree on the edge of her father's
cotton fields, Sidda looks up into the sky. In the crook of the
crescent moon sits the Holy Lady, with strong muscles and a merciful
heart. She kicks her splendid legs like the moon is her swing and the
sky, her front porch. She waves down at Sidda like she has just spotted
an old buddy. Sidda stands in the moonlight and lets the Blessed Mother
love every hair on her six-year-old head. Tenderness flows down from
the moon and up from the earth. For one fleeting, luminous moment,
Sidda Walker knows there has never been a time she has not been
loved." -- from Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
When Siddalee and Vivi Walker, an utterly original 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
fall-out is felt from Louisiana to New York to Seattle. Siddalee, a
successful theatre director with a huge hit on her hands, panics and
postpones her upcoming wedding to her lover and friend Connor McGill.
But Vivi's intrepid gang of life-long girlfriends, 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 seventy," and still making waves. They persuade Vivi to send
Sidda a scrapbook of girlhood momentos entitled "Divine Secrets of the
Ya-Ya Sisterhood."
Sidda retreats to a cabin on Washington State's Olympic Peninsula,
tormented by fear and uncertainty about the future, and intent on
discovering a key to the tangle of anger and tenderness she feels
toward her mother. But the album reveals more questions than answers,
and leads Sidda to encounter the unknowable mystery of life and the
legacy of imperfect love.
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 resulting 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
impossible to tame.
Critical Praise
"A very entertaining and, ultimately, deeply moving novel about the complex bonds between a mother and a daughter."-- Washington Post
"This is thee sweet and sad and goofy
monkey–dance of life, as performed by a bevy of unforgettable Southern
belles in a verdant garden of moonlit prose. Poignantly coo–coo, the
Ya-Yas (and their Petites Ya-Yas) will prance, priss, ponder and party
their way into your sincere affection." -- Tom
Robbins, author of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas
"An insightful, delicious novel." -- The Oregonian
"Rebecca
Wells' new novel is a big, blowzy romp through the rainbow
eccentricities of three generations of crazy bayou debutantes trying to
survive marriage, motherhood, and pain, relying always on their love
for each other. . . . A novel of wide reach and lots of colors: fun in
a breathless sort of way." -- Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"One heck of a rollicking good read. . . . You'll laugh. You'll cry. Buy you'll mostly laugh and want to offer Wells a hearty merci." -- Columbus Dispatch
