The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

I found a battered copy of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants at a library sale the summer I turned seventeen, and I read it in two sittings on a porch that was too hot to sit on. The sequel sat next to it in the same cardboard box, and I almost left it behind. Second books in young adult series often feel like filler, a way to keep the characters busy until the publisher asks for a third. The Second Summer of the Sisterhood is not filler. It is quieter than the first book, more interested in mothers than boys, and it understands that the summer after a death is never the summer you planned.

Ann Brashares published it in 2003 through Delacorte Press. The first edition hardcover runs 400 pages, and it picks up a year after the events of the first novel. The four friends are sixteen. They have survived the first summer of the pants, and they are about to discover that the pants are not a magic solution to growing up. They are a ritual. The magic is in the agreement to keep passing them on.

The pants come back

The premise is simple enough to explain to someone who has never read the series. Four best friends, Bridget, Lena, Carmen, and Tibby, find a pair of jeans that fits all four of them despite their different bodies. They spend their first summer apart, mailing the pants to one another with notes, and the pants become a way of staying connected. In the second summer, the ritual continues, but the stakes are different. The girls are not just trying to have a good summer. They are trying to figure out who they are without the version of themselves that the group has always agreed on.

Brashares moves between the four stories in short chapters, and the structure could have been a mess. It works because each girl is dealing with a variation on the same problem: a relationship with a parent or a parent figure that has changed without warning. Bridget is grieving a mother she barely remembers. Lena is trying to become an adult in a family that still treats her as a daughter first. Tibby is learning that her mother is a person with feelings she can hurt. Carmen is watching her mother fall in love and feeling replaced. The pants are the excuse to keep the four stories in conversation.

The book also does something that I did not appreciate until I reread it. It lets the girls be wrong. They make bad decisions, hurt people, and misunderstand the adults around them. The narrative does not rush to correct them. It lets the consequences land, and then it gives them a chance to repair what they can.

Bridget goes south

Bridget's story is the one that surprised me most. In the first book she is the athlete, the loud one, the girl who charges at everything. In the second book she has gone quiet. She quit soccer. She sleeps too much. She has withdrawn from her friends, and the narrative does not immediately explain why. The explanation comes through letters.

Bridget finds letters that her estranged maternal grandmother, Greta Randolph, wrote to Bridget and her brother years earlier. Bridget's mother died when she was young, and the family has been estranged from Greta for reasons that are not fully spelled out at first. Bridget decides to go to Alabama to see her grandmother, but she does not introduce herself. She uses an alias and offers to help around the house. The deception is not malicious. It is the only way she can imagine approaching a woman who represents the mother she lost.

The Alabama sections are the best part of the novel. Greta is not a saint. She is prickly, private, and set in her ways. Bridget helps her with chores, listens to her stories, and slowly learns about her grandparents and about her mother as a young woman. The details are small: the way Greta keeps her house, the food she makes, the photographs she does not display. Brashares understands that grief is often found in objects rather than speeches.

Bridget also starts coaching a local soccer team and reconnects with Billy Kline, a childhood friend and teammate. The flirtation is gentle and a little awkward, which is right for a girl who has spent a year trying not to feel anything. When Bridget finally tells Greta who she is, Greta reveals that she knew all along. The scene could have been sentimental. It is not, because both women have been protecting themselves, and the honesty is hard for both of them.

What I like about this plot is that it does not solve Bridget's grief. It gives her a grandmother, a team, and a boy, but it does not pretend that the loss of her mother is now closed. The last image of Bridget is not triumphant. It is a girl who has decided to keep living.

Lena and Kostos

Lena's story is the one that made me angry the first time I read it, and it still does, though I understand it better now. She and Kostos fell in love in Greece in the first book. In the second book, they have been trying to make long distance work, and Lena breaks up with him because she is tired of spending her life missing him. It is a reasonable decision for a sixteen-year-old. Then Kostos comes to the United States for an internship, and they see each other again. They reunite. A few days later, he leaves without explanation.

The explanation arrives at Lena's grandfather's funeral. Kostos is married. After Lena broke up with him, he slept with another woman, who became pregnant. He married her because he believes he has to do the right thing. He tells Lena that he does not love his wife, but that he will stay with her, and that he will always love Lena. Lena's mother then tells her about her own first love, a relationship that ended before she met Lena's father. The scene is meant to show Lena that first love is not always the love you build a life on.

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, the plot is honest about the fact that teenage decisions have consequences that cannot be undone. On the other hand, Kostos's wife is barely a character. She exists to create pain for Lena, and the narrative does not give her interiority. The book is from Lena's point of view, so that limitation is understandable, but it also makes the resolution feel cheaper than it should. The ending introduces Paul, Carmen's stepbrother, as a possible new love interest. Lena is not ready, and the book knows it. The final look between them is a promise, not a solution.

Tibby's film course

Tibby spends the summer at a film course in Virginia. She befriends Alex and Maura, two classmates from New York who are sophisticated, dismissive, and exciting. Tibby wants to impress them. She also wants to hurt her parents, or at least to make them see her as something other than a daughter who is still grieving her friend Bailey.

The project she makes about her mother is cruel. It is not cruel because it is honest. It is cruel because Tibby edits it to make her mother look ridiculous. When her mother shows up at the open house and sees it, the humiliation is public. Brian, who has become close to Tibby since Bailey's death, visits and is disappointed in her. Tibby defends Alex and Maura instead of him, and he leaves.

The turnaround is gradual. Tibby realizes that Alex and Maura's cynicism is a performance. They are not smarter than everyone else. They are afraid of being earnest. She ends the friendship, reconciles with her mother and Brian, and makes a new film about Bailey for her final project. The film is not described in detail, which is wise. What matters is that Tibby chooses to make something tender in front of people who might mock it.

This is the plot that feels most closely tied to the series' larger project. The first book is about four girls who love each other. The second book is about learning that love is not enough if you are not willing to be honest. Tibby's cruelty is not treated as a phase. It is treated as a choice she made and has to repair.

Carmen and her mother

Carmen's story is the one that hit closest to home for me. Her mother, Christina, starts dating a coworker named David, and Carmen feels left behind. She is used to being the center of her mother's life. She is also used to being the child of divorce, which means she has a map for her father's new family but not for her mother's new relationship.

Carmen tries to sabotage the relationship. She is rude to David, she sulks, and she makes her mother feel guilty for being happy. When Christina breaks up with David, she becomes depressed, and Carmen realizes that she has hurt the person she loves most. She then helps bring them back together. The reversal is a little neat, but the emotion is real. Children of divorce often become experts at managing their parents' love lives, and Carmen's desire to keep her mother to herself is understandable even when it is unfair.

The subplot with Krista, Carmen's stepsister, is the weaker half of this story. Krista runs away from Charleston to Bethesda after fighting with Carmen's stepmother. Carmen calls Paul for advice, and Paul suggests that Krista is trying to be like her. Carmen helps Krista reconcile with her father and stepmother. The plot is a way to show Carmen that she is not the only person whose family has been rearranged, but it also feels like a detour. Krista is more of a device than a character.

Still, the Carmen sections contain some of the book's sharpest observations about class and family. Carmen's mother works hard. David is a nice man with a nice apartment. Carmen is embarrassed by her own resentment, and she is also embarrassed by the idea that her mother might want a life that does not revolve around her. Brashares does not resolve that embarrassment. She just lets Carmen see it.

The mothers

The Second Summer of the Sisterhood is a book about mothers. Bridget's mother is dead. Lena's mother gives her a story about first love. Tibby's mother is wounded by her daughter's film. Carmen's mother is trying to date. Even the pants have a maternal quality. They are handed down, cared for, and passed on.

The book is also about the limits of maternal knowledge. These mothers do not always understand their daughters. They are tired, distracted, and caught up in their own lives. That is not a failure of the novel. It is the point. The girls are learning that their mothers are people, and the mothers are learning that their daughters are becoming people they cannot fully control.

I think this is why the book has lasted. It does not promise that the girls will stay best friends forever. It promises that they will keep trying. The pants are a symbol of that effort, not a guarantee.

Where the book creaks

The novel has problems. The four storylines are uneven, and the chapters are short enough that some emotional beats are rushed. Kostos's wife is underdeveloped. Krista's subplot is forgettable. The ending ties up too many threads at once, and the introduction of Paul as a future love interest feels like a setup for the next book rather than a conclusion to this one.

The prose is also plain. Brashares is good at dialogue and at the small details of teenage life, but she is not a stylist. Some sentences are doing work that the scene should be doing. The book tells us that the girls are growing up more often than it shows us.

None of that ruined it for me. I read the book quickly, and I was sorry when it ended. The best chapters, especially the Alabama sections, have a warmth that is hard to fake. Brashares writes about grief without making it beautiful. Bridget's sadness is not poetic. It is a girl sleeping through the day and forgetting to eat.

Why I keep coming back

I keep coming back to this book because it is honest about the fact that friendship changes. The four girls are not the same people they were the summer before. They are not going to be the same people next summer. The pants still fit, but the fit is not the point. The point is that they keep sending them.

The Second Summer of the Sisterhood is not a perfect novel. It is a good one, and good is enough. It understands that being sixteen is mostly a series of unfinished conversations with your parents, your friends, and yourself. It understands that the summer after a loss is not a fresh start. It is a continuation, with all the mess that implies.