Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
by Rebecca Wells

Reviewed by Andrea Lord

The writing is swift and deep, the author takes you straight into the complex layers of the sisterhood, moving with grace and ease between multi generations of these four southern women.

The sprawling picture of their lives is divulged with tantalizing snippets from the pages of the Ya Ya scrapbook, but it is also intensely personal and private, whispering secrets that only the reader knows and the whole web is centered in the relationship of a mother and daughter.

She sure writes well, she makes you feel all the way through for these women.

But in the end the book filled me with a terrible sadness that these dynamic, creative, privileged women wasted their tremendous energy rebelling in a self destructive way.

They never changed their lives and then passed their suppression on to their children.

They may have rebelled at the local cotillion and tantamountly defended a black servant, but in the end they married in their social strata and employed low paying black nannies.

They married badly, except for one, who was independently wealthy, the rest chose men that owned and used them, ultimately spending their lives with men that could provide an economical, comfortable and accepted way of life, not men that challenged them, made them grow.

In the end they appeared to be more comfortable being eccentric southern belles than seeking spiritual growth.

The ending fell flat for me -it was too neatly wrapped after so much wrenching and retching - a couple of chapters ending with kisses on the swing in a field of sunflowers!

I have noticed that a lot of women in an affluent society become damaged goods. They marry men they are mentally and economically comfortable with and who reflect the same fears never to venture into unchartered territory.

I experienced an odd synchronicity at the time I was reading this book, I was flipping through the channels on the satellite dish and I checked into a movie called Florence Nightingale starring Jaclyn Smith, now I know it was very stilted and I seriously doubt that Jaclyn Smith looked like Florence Nightingale, but the point was that Florence Nightingale was a very wealthy woman in Victorian London and she chose to break all the rules and go into the poor and desperately sick community and try to make a difference.

Also, while reading this book I happened upon a National Geographic Magazine and for some reason I glanced through the letters to the Editor and one caught my eye. It was a letter from a man describing his cousin who had been a wealthy debutant in the 1960s in Texas. She was rebellious and had irked her parents by continually eating with the servants in the kitchen, finally eloped with an oil rigger and landed in Taos, New Mexico running a gem and mineral store. Her claim to fame was that she discovered some enormous diamond called the Star of Arkansas but it meant little to her because she explained one cannot eat a diamond.

I was touched by both these privileged women stories because for some reason they decided to break away and put their energy into changing woman. To me they made for a more positive story.