Brashares, Ann. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

If, halfway through a book, you find yourself thinking, "This would be a lot more fun if they were lesbians," that just might be a bad sign.

I can't pretend that this is such a bad book. It made me cry, at the end, though in the manner of Titanic: bitter, angry, feeling manipulated by clichés and unable to keep myself from being manipulated.

So, this is the story of four 15-year-old girls who have been friends for literally their entire lives. They spend their first summer apart, sharing between them a pair of thrift-store pants that fits each of them perfectly. Carmen goes to see her father, who's about to get remarried; Lena goes to Greece to see her grandparents; Bridget goes to soccer camp in Mexico; Tibby stays home and works soul-killing retail, and befriends a girl who's dying of leukemia.

Those can't be spoilers, because this is a book entirely without surprises. I don't mean surprises as in plot twists; I mean surprises about people. The girl who plays soccer is pretty, blond, flirty, self-centered. Of course she is. But there's no room for her to do anything that surprises me, that moves her beyond the standard picture of a 15-year-old soccer player. There is a girl whose anarcho-socialist parents abandoned their high ideals for money when they got older. Big surprise. There is a girl who feels awkward and uncommunicative with her Greek grandparents. Big surprise. The book is afraid of sex and death and wildness and mystery, and it's almost funny how oblique it is when it talks about these things.

There was a storm in her body, and when the storm got too strong, she got out. She floated up to the falm fronts. She'd done it before. She'd let the ship go down without its captain. The intimacy between them had been unfathomable. It now stayed there with her, wobbly, waiting to be taken care of. She didn't know how to do that.

The prose is leaden, and about as distinctive and flavorful as cardboard.

I understand exactly why this book is so popular, and--yeah, I can say these things without contempt for the people who like it. It will not make people uncomfortable beyond the point where they want to feel uncomfortable. It isn't pretentious and doesn't pile misery upon misery; the situations and dilemnas that the characters face are basically realistic. Lots of people don't care a whit for prose quality, or Tom Clancy wouldn't be so popular, and I don't think that's necessarily wrong. 14-year-olds are too young to know that kids dying of leukemia is cliché and manipulative; they're young enough to still be surprised, maybe, by the moments that are supposed to be insightful. But I have the right to my own opinion, nonetheless; I don't buy these characters as people, and I don't really care about them. I think even young people deserve better than this.

Brashares, Ann. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. New York: Delacorte Press, 2001.