The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

Two books in a row that are focused on the “female experience”…  this one is called the The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares.  If you have not cried in a while, this one should do it for you, and I’m not a female!  Note: I did lose my first time to a female at RISK tonight at NYU.  Maybe it was finishing the book?  Doubt it.  Imagine 4 young best friends aged 15—Lena Kaligaris, Tibby Rollins, Bridget Vreeland, and Carmen Lowell, who will be apart for their first summer ever.  What will connect them while each has their own adventure?  A pair of jeans!  The story begins just before the summer of the girl’s junior year when Carmen finds a pair of jeans, and they fit each girl, perfectly... which makes the girls think they are magical and will be used as a means to connect with each other at their different part of the world (Lena visiting her grandparents in Greece, Carmen to South Carolina to visit her Dad - who left her town the year before, Bridget to Mexico for a summer camp, and Tibby stayed home to work at the local drugstore - Wallman’s).  Each of the girls has their own “coming of age” experience and share it as they send the magical pants to the next girl on the list.  Each girl is challenged by an issue that makes them go from a teenager to a young adult.  For instance the girls experience: parental divorce and the introduction of a step-mother; the inability to communicate and share truth from perception in a foreign land; losing one’s virginity; and one dealing with unexpected friendship which ends in death.  This in many respects was a teenage version of a movie like Terms of Endearment, Beaches, My Girl, The Notebook, Steel Magnolias… you get the picture, huh?   So much here for the reader to remember your youth and the “best friends” you thought would never leave you.  Sad thing is… they eventually do, for almost all of us.  But this book lets us dream and reconnect with those days.  What a really solid book for any age, though it is focused on the young adult age range.  This is a really short book that I listened to on the ipod.  The characters were rich, the story engaging, and overall a wonderful book.  Read it when you are in one of those “reminiscing” moods.