“The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” or what could have been just another “novel for girls, is above all a funny and intelligent novel. They are four and inseparable. Four teenagers united by an indestructible friendship, born even before they came into the world, when their four mothers crossed paths, pregnant, in a gym class. Still together, Carmen, Tibby, Bridget and Lena will however live their first summer away from each other.
Carmen joins her father in South Carolina where she will have the inconvenience of discovering a new family from which she feels excluded, Lena leaves for Greece with her grandparents, Bridget trains for football in a sports camp where she only has eyes for a coach and Tibby stays in their hometown where meeting intrepid 12-year-old Bayley, who has leukemia, changes the course of her life.
In order not to break the bond between them, the young girls decide to take turns wearing the same jeans, magical because all of them, however different they may be, wear them wonderfully. From week to week, the jeans therefore travel from one to the other, symbol of their friendship and witness to the experiences that will make them grow, the time of a summer.
The very sensitive writing of Ann Brashares, sometimes funny, sometimes moving, marries perfectly the strong characters of each of the girls in whom the readers will recognize themselves without difficulty. An admirably constructed polyphonic novel, which in turn gives voice to four teenage girls. Ann Brashares superbly proves that it is possible today to write intelligent novels for girls. It was time.
