Yada Yada!

I kept coming across blog references to the Yada Yada Prayer Group books,  and mentioned it to Kathryn, our youngest deacon. She and her husband Paul are well up on Christian Novels from the USA.

Sure enough, she had books 1,2 3, 4 [and has just got 5 & 6 I think!] so she lent me 1&2 last Sunday.

I'm not 100% sure what I thought of them.  The blurb on the website says

"What do an ex-con, a former drug addict, a real estate broker, a college student, and a married mother of two have in common?Nothing, or so Jodi Baxter thought. Who would have imagined that God would make a group as mismatched as that the closest of friends? “I almost didn’t even go to the Chicago Women’s Conference—after all, being thrown together with five hundred strangers wasn’t exactly my ‘comfort zone.’ But I would be rooming with my boss, Avis, and I hoped that maybe I might make a friend or two. We... were assigned to a prayer group of twelve women at the conference - there was Flo, an outspoken ex-drug addict; Ruth, a Messianic Jew who could smother-mother you to death; and Yo-Yo, an ex-con who wasn’t even a Christian! Not to mention women from Jamaica, Honduras, South Africa—practically a mini-United nations. We certainly didn’t have much in common. But something happened that weekend to make us realize we had to hang together. So ‘the Yada Yada Prayer Group’ decided to keep praying for each other via e-mail. That worked for a while, but our personal struggles and requests soon got too intense for cyberspace, so we decided to meet together every other Sunday night."

And books 1 and 2 describe the experiences of the women in the group. They are set in Chicago, and so there are a lot of US cultural references which aren't always easy for a Brit to follow.  No Steph, it isn't a rip-off of the YaYa Sisterhood, as we both suspected it might be. But it isn't 'great literature' either. I got through the two novels - around 800 pages very quickly. I'm not a big fan of 'chick-lit' - and I did get the feeling that maybe Neta Jackson churns out book after book just a little too quickly. Some of the characters seem rather stereotypical. The chief protagonist's mother was definitely based on Amy's mother Pat from "Everybody Loves Raymond"!!

However, in many ways the book does give a good picture of the life of a women's prayer group - and challenges the reader's perceptions about acceptance and inclusivity.

I belong to a cyberspace prayer group and it is great - we are all very different women from all over the world, facing many of the issues addressed in the books - and the friendship/prayer support is important to us. But these are not the only friends I have.

I think 'church' in the States is different from over here - I was concerned that Jodi appeared to have spent her entire life surrounded by Christians and had belonged to various churches - but never really seemed to form a close relationship with anybody until she got into the Y-Y thing, and she was suddenly able to drop everything else and support these women through life-and-death scenarios. What happened to the friends she'd had before?

But hey, these books are selling in their millions, so somebody out there must be getting a blessing from them [and I don't just mean the author's royalties] - and I believe passionately in the value of prayer, and if more women are praying because of reading these books, then Hallelujah!

I didn't get on with Harry Potter or Catherine Cookson either - but they fill the shelves of the Public Libraries. If Kathryn lends me the other Y-Y maybe I will start to appreciate them more!