This book got a huge amount of hype when it came out and sold terrifically well - there are heaps of tributes of the 'tears streamed down my face' type. I guess that if you're in the particular situation the novel treats, it will mean all the world to you and may change your life. My own reaction was a bit more 'so what'.
The author's message is very simple and handled very directly. If you think your mother treated you badly as a child, don't judge her harshly: it might be because she had a grim childhood herself, and even when you were little her life may not have all been sun and roses. Siddalee, the protagonist of the framing narrative, comes to realize this of her own (very difficult) mother Vivi through a series of insights and flashbacks into the early lives of Vivi and her friends, the Ya-Yas of the title. This is all fair enough and a good thing to be saying: some people go through years of expensive therapy without reaching this insight. But I think it needs a bit more than a message and a string of entertaining anecdotes to sustain a novel. None of the characters are realized apart from Vivi herself: even her three close friends are very thinly drawn and we get no real insight into their motivations - the friendship between the girls is never really explored, it's just taken for gran!
ted. And the characters of Siddalee, Vivi's parents and the various men in the story are quite appallingly pale and narrow - they might as well not be there at all. Even Siddalee's siblings, who you might think would have something to contribute to the dynamic, are still no more than names by the end of the book.
My overall feeling is that presenting the book as a novel is a bit of a con. One of the gushing reviewers on Amazon says 'If I had realised this book was a self help guide I probably wouldn't have read it', and that's pretty much how I feel too - only not in a good way. Don't get me wrong, I'm not condemning Wells's intentions, and I think it would be good and helpful reading for people who do have this sort of misunderstandingly bad relationship with their parents. But really it could be done an awful lot better - see Kinflicks, by Lisa Alther, or The Women's Room, by Marilyn French, for examples off the top of my head.
