Book review: "Forever in Blue"

“Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood.” By Ann Brashares. Delacorte Press. $18.99. 384 pages.

All good things must end, they say. Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, even Star Trek. (Yes, I know J.J. Abrams is committed to the next movie, but, like, whatevs).

So why not, too, the Sisterhood?

For those uninitiated — i.e., you male readers — the Sisterhood is a group of four best friends, all born weeks apart, who find a magical pair of blue jeans that not only fit all four of them but also are amazingly flattering on each girl.

As a woman who might spend a month or more trying on jeans just to find one pair that fits (currently the search is at three months, in case you were wondering), I can confirm that such a pair of pants is, indeed, magical. Forget “He-who-must-not-be-named.” This is scary shit.

Well, that’s not exactly true. The SOTP series deals with “real” issues, you know, like they do on Degrassi (it doesn’t still have the “Jr. High,” does it?) or One Tree Hill (ok, bad example).

But the four friends — Lena, Carmen, Bridget and Tibby — do have divorced parents, dead parents, dating parents and weird parents. They fall in love, they get sad, they get happy, they get stressed out. They fight with their parents, with their siblings and with each other.

In short, they act pretty much like real teenage girls do.

Years ago, when a friend of mind recommended reading The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, I thought she had to be joking. I hadn’t read so-called “Young Adult” fiction (excepting Harry Potter) since I was a mere babe.

Then I heard another friend, much older than me, recommend the book. If women in their 20s, 30s and 40s were reading a book written for pre-teens and passing it along to their friends, I knew there had to be something to it.

I devoured The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. I remember reading it at a Mexican restaurant in Athens, Ga., trying not to cry as the server brought me my check. It felt so real, even while it was so patently unreal.

I didn’t have divorced parents, but I emphasized with Carmen’s struggles. My mother hadn’t died, but my dad had, so I got it when Bee (a.k.a. Bridget) went nuts. I was a social outcast in high school, just like Tibby. And, like Lena, I have that timid, prudish side.

I was these girls.

The most refreshing thing about the book, however, was the way it dealt with sex. That is to say, there wasn’t much.

I know that today’s ‘tweens are crazy liberated or whatever, according to the media. However, I also remember hearing that same media criticism back in 1989, when I thought I was so grown-up for reading Seventeen when I was 12.

When I was 12, the idea of sex was really gross and scary. Even in high school, when I wore super short skirts that literally caused my mother to yell, “You are not leaving the house wearing that!” — sex freaked me out. Judging by the popularity of the SOTP series, there are a lot of girls today who still feel that way, whatever the media says.

In the first book, Bridget has sex. No one else comes close. Bee later regrets her decision, but not in the Hollywood way — i.e. “We have to tack on the guilt to keep the Christian Coalition from breathing down our necks.” She instead realizes that maybe she was too young to have sex, that maybe what she was seeking was the emotional closeness she lost when her mother died.

The reason The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants was so refreshing was that it didn’t make sex seem like an easy thing to do when you’re 15, but neither did it make it seem like something you shouldn’t do until you’re married. It made sex seem messy, complicated and all too real.

The first book, released in 2001, spawned a 2003 sequel, The Second Summer of the Sisterhood. Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood followed in 2005, as did a movie of the first film, staring Alexis Bledel of Gilmore Girls and America Ferrera of Ugly Betty.

The movie was nowhere nearly as good as the book and glossed over several key (in my mind) plot points, but I still left the theatre sobbing. I mean sobbing. So did my mom.

However, the second and third books in the series were simply not as satisfying as the first, which may be why no movies are in the works for them.

Series tend to either get better and deeper as they evolve, a la Harry Potter and LOTR, or they fade into mediocrity, repeating the same plot over and over to fill the same emotional need while never having quite the same emotional resonance as the first work (see Tim Burton’s Batman or Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic series).

Forever in Blue picks up the year after the girls have started college, three summers after the first book. Of course, everything hasn’t exactly happened the way they thought it would.

Carmen is at Williams and has lost the vibrancy she once had. Bee is happy at Brown but confused about her long-distance relationship with Eric. Tibby is in love with Brian but scared of having sex with him. Lena, being Lena, is still hung up on Kostos. (And if the fictional Kostos looks anything like the filmic Kostos, I would be hung up on him too.)

The four girls spend the summer, as usual, mailing the pants back and forth between them. (This is where the science fiction also comes into play in the series — even when mailing the magical blue jeans to Mexico, Greece or Turkey, they always arrive astoundingly quickly, which, if you have ever mailed something to a country other than Canada, you know does not happen.)

As usual, by the end of the book, there are some tidy endings and you feel all warm and fuzzy and sad too. Yet this sequel is better than the other two, by far (although I say that with the caveat that I have not read them since they came out). It is not as good as the first one, but the emotional depths this novel probe come close.

The biggest difference between the fourth book and the previous three is that it does tackle sex. Two of the four girls have it. Complications ensue. Hearts break and mend, lessons are learned, but, as is the case in every other SOTP novel, nothing is completely resolved.

The only thing that is final (or so it seems) is that there can be no more sequels taking the girls through college with their magical pants. (Yes, something happens to the jeans, but no, it isn’t as obvious as them tearing beyond repair.)

The end of this book made me almost as sad as I suspect the new Harry Potter will in July. For the first time since the first book (excepting the movie), I cried. How I can I not find out what happens to Lena and Kostos? Or Bee?

Brashares has a new book (or series) in the works. Please, please let it be something like Felicity: the Next Generation.