The Second Summer of the Sisterhood by Ann Brashares.
Title: The Second Summer of the Sisterhood.
Author: Ann Brashares.
Genre: Fiction, romance, YA, teen.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: April, 2003.
Summary: With a bit of last summer’s sand in the pockets, the Traveling Pants and the sisterhood who wears them - Lena, Tibby, Bridget, and Carmen - embark on their second summer apart. Lena's love from last year's trip to Greece, Kostas, visits America, but after he leaves and Lena returns to Greece, she is shocked to find out he is now married. Tibby's interest in film-making leas her to spend the summer taking a course at Williamston College, where she goes through a dilemma when she makes a hurtful movie about her formerly radical mother and jilts her close friend, Brian, who tries his hardest to get close to her. Bridget quits soccer and withdraws into herself since her failed romance of last summer, but upon discovering letters written to her and her brother by her maternal grandmother, Greta Randolph, following her mother's death, she journeys to Alabama to visit her, disguises her identity, and while finding out about her family, begins to slowly find herself again. Carmen is trying to foster a romance with a boy named Porter, but is hindered by the distraction of her mother's new relationship with David, a coworker, which seems to be getting serious.
My rating: 8/10
♥ The truth was, Carmen loved the idea of boys. She liked how they looked, how they smelled, how they laughed. She'd read enough magazines to know the rules and intricacies of dating. But when you got right down to it, having dinner with one was kind of like having dinner with a penguin. What were you supposed to talk about?
♥ Maybe it was just the sadness of time passing. Maybe it was a regular-life kind of heartache.
♥ It was a basic human desire to long for the people you loved to love each other.
♥ Carmen had her friends, and she counted on them, but she never forgot that they had real sisters and brothers. A deeply insecure part of Carmen reminded herself that if there were a fire, they'd have to save their brothers and sisters first. The person who would save Carmen in a fire was Christina, and vice versa. Carmen and her mother could pretend the world was large and varied, but they both knew it came down to the two of them.
♥ Carmen felt tears flooding her eyes. She wasn't ready to be vulnerable to her mother yet. Instead, she took her very full heart into the privacy of her room, where she could consider what was in it.
♥ How had Tibby let herself get so far away?Where has she been? Her whole life since Bailey had died now seemed to her like the distant wanderings of an amnesiac full of confusion and forgetting.
She reached out her arm and touched the cold stone with three of her fingertips.
Remind me, she needed to ask. I don't seem to know how to be.
Her ear was pressed to the ground along with her cheek. She listened.
♥ Before Tibby's wondering eyes, her mother instinctively put her hands on Tibby's sad face. Alice's eyes were full of worry that Tibby wasn't where she was supposed to be. Alice remembered that she loved Tibby before she remembered how mad she was at her.
♥ Carmen felt like crying as she watched Tibby walk out the door and across the parking lot. She knew a worse friend would have made her feel better.
♥ She had the perverse wish that the ugly consequences of her tirades would magically dissolve within a few hours. She wished her victims would just snap right back like cartoon characters after they got their heads flattened by a frying pan. Instead, the wreckage lived on, far longer than her anger.
♥ Sometimes you just had to face it. You had to march right into the ugly middle, Tibby told herself. Otherwise you ended up flat against the wall, creeping fearfully around the edge your whole life.
♥ "I want you to leave me alone, but not ignore me. I want you to miss me when I go away to college but not be sad. I want you to stay exactly the same but not be lonely or alone. I want to do the leaving, and not have you ever leave me. That's not really fair, is it?"
Christina shrugged. "You're the daughter. I'm the mother. It's not meant to be fair." She laughed. "I don't recall you changing any diapers."
Carmen laughed too.
"Oh, and one more thing." Carmen rolled back onto her side, facing her mom. "I want you to be happy."
♥ In that moment, Carmen understood how it was for mothers. Mrs.Morgan didn't taste it because she wanted to. She did it because she loved him. And for some reason, Carmen found this thought mysteriously comforting.
♥ Bridget wondered whether it came down to the claustrophobic choice between dying beautiful or living ugly.
♥ If you are a Greek, you know that it is traditionally considered an insult to the ancient gods to think you know when things can't get any worse. If you make this mistake, then the gods will prove you wrong.
♥ She promised herself she would hang [the picture] on the wall of her room, no matter where she was. Because Bailey had understood what was real, and when Tibby saw Bailey's face, she couldn't hide from it.
♥ "I think I have that disease where your heart swells up."
"Well," Tibby said philosophically, "I guess I would say, Better a swollen hearty than a shrunken one."
♥ Carmen wondered at the power of silence to create a stronger bond, even, than thousands and thousands of words.
♥ Four young women sat on a brick wall. They all had their arms around each other's shoulders and waists. They all overlapped their ankles, like they might burst into a cancan. They were laughing. One of them had beautiful blond hair. One had dark wavy hair and dark eyes - her smile was the widest. One had freckles and flyaway hair. The fourth had straight black hair and classic features. It was a picture of friendship, but it wasn't the Sisterhood. It was their mothers, long ago. Tibby noted with joy that they were all wearing jeans.