Put Your Pants On!: "Sisterhood Everlasting" by Ann Brashares

Still not done with Diviners, so I thought I'd post something completely different.


Just so we're clear, I loved the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series. Books 1 through 4 were quite pleasing to me. But then came the (long-awaited? Somewhat anticipated? Completely out of the blue?) epilogue novel, Sisterhood Everlasting. Having a few questions I wanted answers to about the fate of the Pantsed Four, I dove right in.

 I found it to be an outright travesty of an "epilogue." The four characters I had grown so fond of and learned so much about had been altered in ways that barely made sense at all.

 Bridget went from free-spirited to manically obsessed with moving all over California ALL THE DAMN TIME, and she was all "Whoopsie-daisy, my birth control expired, but no big deal, right?" when she should have been considerably more concerned that, oh, I don't know, IT MEANT SHE WAS PROBABLY PREGNANT. Which, naturally, she was! And even though she wants to end it right away, the nurse is all "Wait and see if you change your mind!" Which she does. And after becoming a babysitter to Tibby's surprise daughter, she realizes that BABIES ARE AWESOME and of course she wants one! What kind of woman wouldn't want a child, especially a woman as clearly troubled and unstable as Bridget?!

Uch, Lena. What HAPPENED to you? Rather than being the more confident, less inhibited woman she was in Forever in Blue, she's regressed to the point of being worse than her introverted Book One self. She settles for living the most boring life possible as an antisocial art teacher who denies herself the chance of living a happy life with Kostos time and time again. They should have gotten together long before now, but  didn't, because SHE CHICKENED OUT. Seriously, she cancelled a reunion with him years back because just the anticipation of the event made her physically sick. Girl, get yourself some therapy. Please.

And so, it seems that "Get back together with Kostos" is doomed to be the repeating storyline for Lena Kaligaris. Who cares if she never becomes a famous artist? Who cares if she alienates her only sister and still can't forgive her for losing the Pants all those years ago? The most important issue is WILL SHE AND KOSTOS EVER GET TOGETHER FOR GOOD?! Because the man you met at sixteen will end up being the man you marry! Why else would Bridget and Tibby still be with their teenage boyfriends? (Carmen didn't get a boyfriend until Girls in Pants, and so this means she will never find true love. Apparently.)

Carmen has sold out and become a materially-obsessed TV star who's marrying a jerk of a guy she doesn't really love. She throws herself into planning a wedding after what happens to Tibby because it beats being sad all the time. Of course, after her new iPhone refuses to work on a train to an important audition, she ends up becoming a babysitter for a man and his two young children for the evening. And by the time they get to the station, voila! The transformation is complete, and she is "human" again. Career-making role be damned! iPhone be damned! Wedding be damned! She has been reborn as as Real Person!

Tibby, most unfortunately, drowns during a swim in Greece, but not before she and Brian have a secret love child in Australia that she DIDN'T EVEN TELL HER PARENTS ABOUT. Really, it comes as a surprise to EVERYONE that Tibby has a kid. And she's managed to write scads of  posthumous letters to each of her friends telling them what they should do with their lives, but she NEVER EXPLAINS WHY SHE KEPT HER PREGNANCY AND SUBSEQUENT LIFE-THREATENING ILLNESS A SECRET. You owed them that much information after two years! They spent MONTHS believing you'd committed SUICIDE!

Also, she bought a beautiful farm in Pennsylvania and furnished three little renovated barns on it for Carmen, Lena and Bridget. That's lovely, Tibster, but how in holy fuck did you find the time and money to do all this? And what was the plan if you had lived long enough for everyone to reunite here? Did you think they'd all just pack up their lives and move out to the Farm of the Sisterhood forever and ever? What, this is another to-remain-unsolved mystery? Fuck it. I hate this storyline.

All capital-letter-inducing rants aside, it isn't a badly written book. Ann Brashares is a talented writer who writes with genuine emotion and knows her characters inside and out. It just seems that she should have left well enough alone with these particular four.