REVIEW: Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells

I get the feeling that I'm in the minority where this novel is concerned. Now, I do not normally read in this genre, and only read this book as it was a gift from my mother's best friend - who is basically my aunt. This may have affected my reading on the book, but that does not diminish the fact that I didn't like it much.

CHARACTERS
While the main character of Divine Secrets is Sidda Walker, the character that gets the most focus and development is her mother, Vivi. Marginal characters are Sidda's fiance Connor and Vivi's three best friends, Caro, Teensy, and Necie. And out of them, I liked Connor the best.

Let's start with Vivi. I found her (and her friends, to be honest) to be self-centered, spoiled, and without a care for most people in her life. Vivi is one of those women who takes self-care to the extreme and stops believing that anyone but herself and her feelings matter. She and her three friends, who call themselves the Ya-Yas, believe themselves to be goddesses in their own minds, despite literally no one doing anything to make them think this (sure, they're popular at school, but what nine year old is as self-important as Vivi?), and think that this enables them to get away with anything at all. Vivi in particular is alcoholic, became a mother because she liked the attention that came with being pregnant, and expects everyone to worship her.

Vivi's friends, while sharing much with Vivi, do not have much personality otherwise. There is something that makes each character unique, but it is only one thing, and not enough to make them separate. Even now, a day after finishing it, I can't remember the difference between Teensy and Caro. However, I feel that this has more to do with the writing, and will discuss further there.

Moving on to Sidda and Connor: Sidda is rather neurotic. Within the first couple chapters, it was obvious to me that she had some sort of anxiety disorder at the very least, perhaps something else as well. However, I liked Sidda. She did not try to hide from her problems (no, I do not count getting away to a secluded cabin to think running away), and seemed to me someone I could be friends with. However, I do think she was given the short end of the stick in terms of character development and page-time, making her feel flat at times. Connor is actually somewhat one-dimensional: he is Sidda's caring fiance, the man she loves and who would do anything for her. However, I feel like he could be very relateable with a little more development.

PLOT
The plot of the story involves Sidda, who is a theatre director, accidentally revealing to the New York Times that her mother once beat her and her siblings violently when they were children. This, of course, gets sensationalized and published, and causes Vivi to cut Sidda out her life and will. Desperate for her mother's approval (the roots of which we see in flashbacks to Sidda's childhood), Sidda asks for Vivi's help with her next play, which is about a group of friends. In response, Vivi's friends convince her to send Sidda a scrapbook of memorabilia through the years, known as the Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Fearing she is broken beyond repair and unfit for marriage, Sidda postpones her wedding to Connor and retreats to a friend's cabin in Northern Washington with her dog, where she reads the scrapbook, thinks about her childhood, and walks around a lot.

The story is intercut with flashbacks to Vivi's life, from the age of eight to motherhood, as well as conversations between the Ya-Yas. Here, we learn that Vivi's mother was unbearably religious, her grandmother hated her mother and doted on Vivi, her father was neglectful unless he was dropping diamond rings in Vivi's lap, and that Vivi's first love died in WWII. We also learn that Vivi was sent to a convent school by her mother when she was a teenager, as her mother "feared for her soul" - a disguise for her own hatred of how adored her daughter was, more than likely. At the school, Vivi was horribly mistreated and told she was a terrible person that no one could ever love, and may have developed an eating disorder. It is also revealed that Vivi did not like being a mother, and once ran away from her children for two days and fantasized about leaving them forever and starting over.

It is also worth noting that the pivotal child-beating scene is a result of a Lenten season during which the dangerously alcoholic Vivi gave up drinking, only to be arrested two weeks in. She went to a different priest, who recommended her to a doctor who prescribed her a highly dangerous drug to get her off the drink. Vivi became dependent on the pills, and after a religious retreat apparently became convinced her children were full of demons that she had to beat out of them. She was sent to a mental hospital, and is as recovered as she can be (though still alcoholic), however she refuses to talk about it and seems to feel no remorse.

While the plot of a daughter looking through her mother's memories is intriguing, I felt like this story was a bit all over the place. It seems that Wells wanted to cram every issue she could into the novel: child abuse, religious-related abuse, substance and alcohol abuse, racism, and death. It's a lot for barely 400 pages, and not all of it is handled well. For instance, as stated above, Vivi does not seem to feel bad about beating her children so badly that they still bear scars, or about manipulating them with her mercurial mood swings so that they were afraid of her as children and still are - it is not even clear that she thinks these are bad things, she simply expects everyone to laugh and say "oh, that's just Vivi!" In another aspect, the negative effects of the Ya-Yas obvious alcoholism is not addressed. Nearly every scene involves drinking in some way, no matter what time of day it is set in. I found this shocking, and hard to believe.

The racism, as well as the details of the South pre-Civil Rights, is another topic I found could have been handled better. As the novel is set in Louisiana ranging from the late 30's to the early 90's, I expected some casual racism, but it is never challenged. There is one time where a child Vivi throws a plate at a boy who insults a black woman, but this is obviously Vivi's dislike of the boy himself showing, rather than anger on the part of the woman. Up into the 90's, it is implied that the Ya-Yas still have black maids, and the one employed by Vivi's family even lives in a very small home on the Walker property. There is also much glorification of the Confederacy and Civil War in a section about Gone With the Wind, a view which is never challenged even by Sidda, the perspective character for the section. I feel that Divine Secrets, in fact, glorifies the Old South in general, painting Louisiana in the 30's and 40's as a gloriously happy place for everyone. I find this to be disingenuous, and this colored my enjoyment.

Also, I found that for a book with Sisterhood in the title, the non-Vivi Ya-Yas were more set pieces than a central part of the story. No part of the novel focuses on female friendship for more than a few pages, instead devoting all its time to showing how damaged Sidda and Vivi are. I feel a better title would have been "The Divine Secrets of Vivi Walker".

WRITING
The writing of this is another area I have to take issue with. While for the most part, Wells' writing is rather simple and easy to read, at times she delves into ultra-flowery purple pose: such as every time she waxes poetic about the moon. I found both styles annoying and grating to read, an dwas pleased when I was finally finished with the book and could stop reading it. I liked the bits of Louisiana dialect and Cajun French, though.

I also felt that the non-Vivi Ya-Yas felt indistinct as characters, mainly as a fault of the writing. Either Wells did not have the time to develop the three of them as individuals, or did not know how to, because I kept getting them confused. The three of them spoke exactly the same way, using exactly the same words, so I could not determine which one of them was speaking without dialogue tags. Which there were plenty of.

All in all, I found that this novel could have done with some more editing and re-writes.

RATING
Three stars at first, knocked down to two and a half. The half stays because I love the woman who gave it to me.

RECOMMENDATION
What recommendation? I wouldn't tell anyone to read this unless they've already told me they like overly dramatic Southern female family dramas set in the past with lots of alcohol involved. Since that's very specific, I doubt I'll be recommending this to anyone.