Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood

Amazon.com
Ages 12 and up. Best buds Tibby, Carmen, Lena and Bridget are back with their magical pair of shared jeans in Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood. Each summer brings new and difficult challenges, as the perennially separated friends discover afresh this last season before college. Tibby struggles with the idea of close friend Brian becoming her boyfriend, and their fragile relationship is soon tested by a tragedy in her immediate family. Carmen doesn’t know how to react when she finds out that her middle-aged mom is pregnant, and Bridget is unpleasantly surprised to be reunited with the boy who broke her heart two summers ago. Finally, Lena, still coming to terms with the loss of her first love, tries to convince her strict father that art school is a better career path than Greek restaurant management. But through every crisis, each girl is assured of the love and support of the created sisterhood when she pulls on the denim armor of the cherished, and by now, a bit fragrant ("Rule # 1. You must never wash the Pants.") Traveling Pants.

Full of homey platitudes about life, love and the pursuit of perfect jeans, Girls in Pants occasionally reads like a lengthy Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul entry. But often that’s precisely the kind of friendly reassurance female readers are looking for, and fans of the wildly popular series who’ve journeyed every summer with the "Septembers" will find much to laugh and cry about in this concluding volume. --Jennifer Hubert

From School Library Journal
Grade 7 Up - Four friends embark on their third summer of adventures, beginning with their high school graduation. Tibby ponders the change in her relationship with a male friend who now wants to date her. She is devastated when her little sister is seriously injured after falling out a window that Tibby accidentally left open. Lena's plans to attend art school are disrupted when her conservative father discovers her sketching a nude male model during a summer class and refuses to pay the tuition. Carmen takes a job looking after Lena's cantankerous grandmother. She decides to attend college locally when she discovers that her mother and new stepfather are expecting a baby. Bridget goes to summer camp and is surprised to learn that her ex-fling is also a counselor. As in the previous books, the pants move from girl to girl weaving their special magic, but they are mentioned only briefly and it is easy to forget who has them when. The multiple story lines abruptly switch within chapters, building suspense. However, reluctant readers may miss having more solid transitions. The novel will appeal to those wanting light fare as the girls spend most of their time fretting about boys and all of their tribulations end happily. Fans will clamor for the latest in the series. The story stands alone, but references to the previous summers will attract readers to the other books. - Linda L. Plevak, Saint Mary's Hall, San Antonio, TX Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Gr. 8-12. It's the summer before the Septembers go to college, a summer in which old and new boyfriends appear, families grow and change, crises occur and are resolved, and the pants continue their designated rounds. Despite their diverse schedules, the four friends who appeared in the previous Traveling Pants books reunite one final weekend before they go off to four different colleges. Readers of the other books won't be disappointed with these new adventures: Carmen's mother is pregnant; Bee is back at soccer camp with her old crush, Eric; Tibby's sister falls from her second-story window; and Lena's parents refuse to pay for art school. Beneath these crisis-ridden plotlines lies an artist at work--an author who encourages her readers to look, feel, trust, and empathize with her characters. It's a strong ending to a series about four fully developed, strikingly different, equally fascinating teenage girls. Frances Bradburn
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
The Pants first came to us at the perfect moment. That is, when we were splitting up for the first time. It was two summers ago when they first worked their magic, and last summer when they shook up our lives once again. You see, we don’t wear the Pants year-round. We let them rest so they are extra powerful when summer comes. (There was the time this spring when Carmen wore them to her mom’s wedding, but that was a special case.) Now we’re facing our last summer together. In September we go to college. And it’s not like one of those TV shows where all of us magically turn up at the same college. We’re going to four different colleges in four different cities (but all within four hours of one another—that was our one rule). We’re headed off to start our real lives. Tomorrow night at Gilda’s we’ll launch the Pants on their third summer voyage. Tomorrow begins the time of our lives. It’s when we’ll need our Pants the most.

From the Inside Flap
The Pants first came to us at the perfect moment. That is, when we were splitting up for the first time. It was two summers ago when they first worked their magic, and last summer when they shook up our lives once again. You see, we don’t wear the Pants year-round. We let them rest so they are extra powerful when summer comes. (There was the time this spring when Carmen wore them to her mom’s wedding, but that was a special case.)

Now we’re facing our last summer together. In September we go to college. And it’s not like one of those TV shows where all of us magically turn up at the same college. We’re going to four different colleges in four different cities (but all within four hours of one another—that was our one rule). We’re headed off to start our real lives.

Tomorrow night at Gilda’s we’ll launch the Pants on their third summer voyage. Tomorrow begins the time of our lives. It’s when we’ll need our Pants the most.

About the Author
A lover of travel and of pants, Ann Brashares lives in New York City with her husband and three children.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Granted, Tibby was in a mood. All she could see was change. All anybody talked about was change. She didn’t like Bee’s wearing heels for the second day in a row. She felt peevish about Lena’s getting three inches trimmed off her hair. Couldn’t everybody just leave everything alone for a few minutes?
Tibby was a slow adjuster. In preschool, her teachers had said she had trouble with transitions. Tibby preferred looking backward for information rather than forward. As far as she was concerned, she’d take a nursery school report card over a fortune-teller any day of the week. It was the cheapest and best self-analysis around.
Tibby saw Gilda’s through these same eyes. It was changing. Its glory days of the late nineteen eighties were far behind it. It was showing its age. The once-shiny wood floor was scratched and dull. One of the mirror panels was cracked. The mats looked as old as Tibby, and they’d been cleaned much less. Gilda’s was trying to get with the times, offering kickboxing and yoga, according to the big chalkboard, but it didn’t look to Tibby like that was helping much. What if it went out of business? What a horrible thought. Maybe Tibby should buy a subscription of classes here? No, that would be weird, wouldn’t it?
“Tibby, you ready?” Lena was looking at her with concerned eyebrows.
“What if Gilda’s closes?” Tibby opened her mouth, and that was what came out.
Carmen, holding the Traveling Pants, Lena, lighting the candles, Bee, fussing with the dimmer switches near the door, all turned to her.
“Look at this place.” Tibby gestured around. “I mean, who comes here?”
Lena was puzzled. “I don’t know. Somebody. Women. Yoga people.”
“Yoga people?” Carmen asked.
“I don’t know,” Lena said again, laughing.
Tibby was the one most capable of emotional detachment, but tonight it all lay right on the surface. Her irrational thoughts about Gilda’s made her feel desperate, like its demise could swallow up their whole existence—like a change in the present could wipe out the past. The past felt fragile to her. But the past was set, right? It couldn’t be changed. Why did she feel such a need to protect it?
“I think it’s Pants time,” Carmen said. The snacks were out. The candles were lit. The egregiously bad dance music played.
Tibby wasn’t sure she wanted it to be Pants time yet. She was having enough trouble maintaining control. She was scared of them noticing what all this meant.
Too late. Out of Carmen’s arms came the artifacts of their ritual. The Pants, slowly unfolding from their winter compression, seeming to gain strength as they mixed with the special air of Gilda’s. Carmen laid them on the ground, and on top of them the manifesto, written on that first night two years before, describing the rules of wearing them. Silently they formed their circle, studying the inscriptions and embroidery that chronicled their summer lives.
“Tonight we say good-bye to high school, and bye to Bee for a while,” Carmen said in her ceremonial voice. “We say hello to summer, and hello to the Traveling Pants.”
Her voice grew less ceremonial. “Tonight we are not worrying about good-bye to each other. We’re saving that for the beach at the end of the summer. That’s the deal, right?”
Tibby felt like kissing Carmen. Brave as she was, even Carmen was daunted by the implications of looking ahead.
“That’s the deal,” Tibby agreed heartily.
The last weekend of the summer had already become sacred in their minds. Sacred and feared. The Morgans owned a house right on the beach in Rehoboth. They had offered it to Carmen for that final weekend, in part, Carmen suspected, because they had gotten an au pair from Denmark and felt guilty about not hiring Carmen to babysit this summer as she had done the summer before.
The four of them had promised each other in the spring that it would be their weekend. The four of them and nobody else. They all depended upon it. The future was unfurling fast, but whatever happened this summer, that weekend stood between them and the great unknown.
They all looked ahead to college in different ways, Tibby knew. They all had different amounts to lose. Bee, in her lonely house, had nothing. Carmen did; she dreaded saying good-bye to her mother. Tibby feared leaving the familiarity of her chaos. Lena flipped and flopped—one day she was afraid to cut ties, and the next she was dying to get away.
The thing they feared equally and powerfully was saying good-bye to one another.
After drawing for the Pants (Tibby won), reviewing the rules (unnecessary, but still part of tradition), and taking a brief hiatus to chew down some Gummi Worms, it was at last time for the vow. Like they had the summer before, they said it together.
“To honor the Pants and the Sisterhood
And this moment and this summer and the rest of our lives
Together and apart.”
Only this time, Tibby felt the tears fall when they said “the rest of our lives.” Because in the past that had always seemed like a distant road, and tonight, she knew in her heart, they were already on it.


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Tilly, Carmen, Lena and Bee are graduating from high school and heading to college-Brown, RISD, NYU, and Williams. In the summer before college, before getting on with "their real lives," the girls have the Pants to keep them connected as they go their separate ways. Brashares provides a prologue for those new to the saga, explaining the sisterhood and the magical powers of the Pants they share-one at a time, of course-during the summer. The Pants offer a kind of spiritual link between the girls, providing love, security and connectedness as they face various dramas with boys, parents, new siblings and uncertain futures. The theme of this volume is change, as the girls understand they are leaving one life behind, but in one way or another, each realizes that leaving home doesn't mean giving up home or friends. Four intersecting story lines, snappy dialogue, empathy for characters and humor make this installment as enjoyable as the others. Legions of fans will enjoy spending another summer with the girls. (Fiction. 12+)


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