I thought it would be a fun movie to see with my BFF. I believe I saw this movie for my 20th birthday. Despite all that, the girls remain sympathetic. The chapter breaks open with quotations, most of which are from real sources, but some of which are from characters in the book who never say those quoted lines elsewhere in the book.

It even avoids using the word death when Bailey dies. For example, it doesn’t explicitly say that Bridget slept with her soccer coach or that Lena’s grandparents thought she was assaulted. Tibby’s storyline is the best of the four, but it also deals with a magically wise cancer kid, which is a dated trope. The book dances around a lot of its big conflicts. I thought Carmen was right to be angry at her father and was aggravated that the book treated this as a character flaw. Instead of seeking help from other camp counselors in dealing with her, he sleeps with her and then is blasé about it when he realizes she is obviously not. Bridget’s “romance” was also infuriating the adult college student she, it’s implied, has sex with, acts like he’s helpless to her attention. Her grandparents, because all Lena’s says about the spying incident is that Kostos is not a nice boy, seem to think that she was sexually assaulted based on the way they go after Kostos and his family, and yet, terribly, don’t allow her to talk about it, even when she’s trying to clear up what happened. Later, when she happens upon him swimming naked, she decides that it was just an accident and, without having a single conversation about the mix-up or about anything at all, decides that she’s in love with him. She avoids Kostos at the beginning, which leads to her to think he is creepily spying on her when he pops up where she is skinny-dipping alone. The character development is pretty shallow, particularly for the secondary characters (except, notably, Effie, who is the best).

I likely would have really liked this book if I had read it when it was new and I was an actual teenager. Carmen is visiting her father in North Carolina, Lena and her sister are visiting their grandparents in Greece, Bridget is attending a soccer camp in Baja California, Mexico, and Tibby is working at a local supermarket at home. THE BOOK: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares (2001)įour friends discover they can all fit into a magical pair of second-hand jeans and decide to share the pants, sending them to each other by mail, over the course of the first summer they are apart.

The traveling pants book