As in her first novel, Little Altars Everywhere, Rebecca Wells continues to elaborate the lives of the Ya-Ya clan with a patchwork of stories, some told in first-person style, some in third. The first group of vignettes describes the meeting of the four original Ya-Yas as four-year-old girls in Thornton, Louisiana: Teensy, with a pecan stuck up one nostril, meets Vivi in the waiting room of the doctor's office, Teensy and Vivi crawl beneath the pews during mass to pull Necie's braids, and Caro's family owns the town movie theatre where the girls love to go with Teensy's vivacious mother, Genevieve.
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The next group of vignettes is rooted in the childhood of Vivi's children, the four Walker kids. Siddalee describes her first diectorial experience, coaching her mother and the other Ya-Yas through a dinner party performance, and recalls the family's trip to Houston to see the Beatles in concert. Tiny Baylor steals cash from his father's wallet to buy a antique globe, and Shep knocks himself unconscious by running into a glass door the first time he glimpses snow.
Things take a dramatic turn in later vignettes when angry misfit Edythe Spevey kidnaps one of the grandchildren of the Ya-Yas. The entire tribe comes out en masse to help Necie and her family find the missing girl.
The review of this Book prepared by Jacqueline West
