Thursday, April 9, 1998
Close friends, closer family highlight new Wells’ novel
BOOK: ‘Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood’ delivers
emotional tale
By Vanessa VanderZanden
Daily Bruin Staff
Down on the bayou, sippin’ bourbon in the hot Louisiana nights,
just you and your girlfriends stripped down to your panties. That’s
what the Ya-Ya’s are all about. That, and the bond they share which
transcends the ties of blood or marriage.
The four female friends raise hell, stirring up debutante balls
and shaking up their town in the pages of Rebecca Wells’ novel,
"Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood."
Focusing on the relationship between Vivi and her daughter,
Sidda, the book beautifully flips from Sidda’s shaky present to
Vivi’s mysterious past. An intriguing look at the importance of
revealing family histories proliferates in the novel.
However, what the reader walks away with stems more from the
four aging women’s close companionship than the underlying theme of
mother and daughter connection. Calling themselves "Ya-Yas," the
tribe of four friends stay true to each other from childhood well
into their golden years. Like one communal soul filling four
separate bodies from youth to old age, the friends share everything
from the same bed during childhood sleep-overs to experiences
raising each others’ kids.
Wells artfully crafts the females’ separate backgrounds allowing
readers to better understand their characters. Yet, though the
women’s lives are full of trauma, Wells never overdramatizes their
positions, revealing the clan to be as real as any small-town gang
of girls. Still, the clan exists more as that perfect, trusting
group of buddies that seem closer and truer to each other and
themselves than any band of friends known to exist.
Their adventures come to life through the pages of this novel in
the form of a scrapbook which Vivi keeps of her friends and sends
to Sidda. Looking over the various newspaper clippings of the group
crashing parties and exposing themselves in public, Sidda gets a
taste of the tales her mother never told her. The reader, however,
gets to hear the full details of the events which leave Sidda
baffled and more than a little curious.
Sidda herself must come to terms with her own feelings involving
love and relationships, engaged to the man of her dreams. Through
an understanding of her mother and her mother’s friends, Sidda
begins to better comprehend how to deal with her own romantic
hesitations.
However, the novel avoids being a cut-and-dry tale by not
offering easy solutions to complex situations. The time spent
carving out the many-sided being of the alcoholic, spit-fire Vivi
and her almost jealous attitude toward her own daughter allow the
story more depth than a mere simplistic, female-bonding work.
The characters wear rough edges, exposing their interiors only
in the most extreme of instances. Wells provides the thoughts of
both Vivi and Sidda, often times reflecting the joy they take in
simplistic pleasures, like the smell of the hot, Louisiana night
air.
Wells’ novel may or may not move readers to tears, depending on
how close a parallel can be drawn between its characters and the
readers’ own relationships, but it cannot be denied that Wells
produces an extremely powerful work. Linking historical events from
the screen release of "Gone With the Wind" and World War II with
plot events, the tale only takes on that much more credibility.
Undeniably, readers will fall in love with the Ya-Yas and seek out
their own breed of buddies at the book’s end.