Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood by Ann Brashares.
Title: Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood.
Author: Ann Brashares.
Genre: Fiction, teen, YA, romance, family saga.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: January 9, 2007.
Summary: The girls are back from their first year of college in one of the most important summers the pants had ever seen them through yet. Lena is taking an extra class and begins to fall for a talented artist, Leo, until her first love Kostas comes back into her life, newly divorced and unwilling to give up on her. Tibby is staying home to work for the summer, but after getting too close, emotionally more than physically, with her boyfriend Brian, having a pregnancy scare and breaking up with him, can she take it if he truly moves on? Fleeing from her grieving father and brother, Bridget goes to Mexico for an archaeological dig, but after almost breaking apart a family, she re-thinks her own relationship with her boyfriend and her family. Carmen is feeling like she is losing her identity, until she finds a place on the stage, to the great chagrin of her only new "friend," Julia, who seems to delight in Carmen's growing insecurities. In the end of the summer, when the pants go missing, and the girls have to travel all the way to Greece, they will discover the most important lesson of their life-long friendship yet.
My rating: 8.5/10.
♥ He refused to give her what she wanted. She refused to take what he gave.
♥ It didn't mean that her mother didn't love her. She'd given Carmen life, but she couldn't be expected to keep giving it. And yet Carmen wasn't sure how to live by herself.
♥ Usually Bridget liked airplane food. She was one of the very few people who did.
If you scarfed it down while it was steaming hot, it tasted pretty good. If you thought about it too much and let it get cold, she now realized, it wasn't so appealing. That was true of many things in life.
♥ After that she spent a lot of time convincing herself that what you saw, even what you felt, had an unreliable relationship to what was actually there. What was actually there was reality, regardless of whether you saw it or how you felt about it.
♥ When you belonged nowhere, you sort of belonged everywhere, she mused.
♥ The happiness at getting what you want is not usually commensurate with the worry leading up to it. Relief is a short-lived emotion, passive and thin. The agony of doubt disappears, leaving little memory of how it really felt. Life aligns behind the new truth.
♥ Why was it that when her mouth obeyed her she was chokingly boring, and when it didn't she was mortifying? Where was the in-between?
♥ She realized all at once the deeper thing that bothered her, the thing that made him not just irritating but intolerable: how he kept loving her blindly when she deserved it so little.
♥ Peter had said she could learn a thing or two from the Greeks, and he was right. The Greeks knew about cycles of misery. They knew about family curses passed down through long generations. Even seemingly forgivable infractions started wars, infidelities, the sacrifice of children. They also ended in wars, infidelities, the sacrifice of children.
No - in fact, they didn't end that way. They didn't end at all. In the stories, the destruction kept on going, propagated by the blind bungling of human failure.
♥ Desire came from deficit, and Tibby had a surplus.
♥ When you remembered to forget, you were remembering. It was when you forgot to forget that you forgot.
♥ Where there is nothing, there is the possibility of everything. When you live nowhere, you live everywhere.
♥ Had they gotten over each other? she wondered. It seemed more likely they had gotten over themselves.
♥ "I think we might have lost the Pants a while ago," Tibby said, pressing her hands into the sand, her face abstracted. "I mean, I think we lost the idea of them. They came to us to keep us together, and I think we were using them to help us stay apart."