While I was in the middle of reading Looking for Alaska, disaster struck. Well, not exactly anything life threatening. I got bored. And something even worse happened--I went to a bookstore. I may or may not pick the book up again, but for now, I have moved on... which is actually a great segway to start talking about the book that I recently started reading (and recently finished haha): Ann Brashares' Sisterhood Everlasting.
The fifth novel in the Traveling Pants series is nothing like the rest. I first read Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants as a seventh grader at Marcus Whitman Junior High. It was everything an overemotional middleschool girl needed: it had friendship, magic, romance, and best of all, a moral to the story (which, I have to say, was lacking in a lot of the books that I read as a 12-year-old).
I'm not going to lie--when I first saw Sisterhood Everlasting sitting on that table in Barnes and Noble, surrounded by all those other random novels that didn't really matter much to me, I could not help but immediately pick it up and start reading. I was ridiculously hooked, but since I was still reading Looking for Alaska, and also trying to save some money, I figured I probably shouldn't buy it. I did not stop thinking about it for days. Three days later, I went to Fred Meyer, and bought it.
Just as the first novel was everything 12-year-old me needed, Sisterhood Everlasting was everything 22-year-old me needed. The girls are all grown up now, and they have to deal with these very mature, adult emotions, and moments, and loss... And if you read the book that came before this one, you would know that the magical pants that the girls shared as kids are now gone, lost with their childhood. They have no choice but to deal with their lives, and there is no running away anymore, there is no hiding behind a pair of pants to make things better. Or, rather, to make things seem better.
Where magic was a driving force in The Traveling Pants, realism thrives in Everlasting. The girls are not as close as they were as kids, and they barely even know what is going on in eachother's lives. Everyone has gone their separate ways. Sound familiar, anyone?
And then something terrible happens, and instead of bringing the girls together, it drives them even further away.
I might as well just warn you now that if you do decide to pick up Sisterhood Everlasting, you might want to have box of kleenex with you at all times. I spent most of the book drowning my eyes in my own tears, because I was trying to force them all back in.
Well, that's all I'm going to say for now... Wouldn't want to let anything else spill out! :)
-Erika
