The Ya-Ya Boxed Set

Book excerpt: A special Mother's Day boxed set of Rebecca Wells's two New York Times-bestselling novels of the Ya-Yas and the Walker Clan, including a new Note to the Reader. Both Little Altars Everywhere and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, chronicling the touching, funny, beguiling Walker family of Thornton, Louisiana, have been phenomenal critical and popular hits. Little Altars Everywhere, the first book, began life as a small-press, word-of-mouth cult classic in 1992, went on to win the Western States Book Award, and was included in the anthology Five Hundred Great Books by Women (Penguin, 1994). It followed Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood onto the New York Times bestseller list in 1998. The 1996 sequel, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, sparked the creation of Ya-Ya clubs around the country, and inspired Terry McMillan (San Francisco Chronicle) to exclaim, "I read the first two pages and I said, 'I haven't heard a white woman talk like this in literature before.'"