The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares.
Title: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.
Author: Ann Brashares.
Genre: Fiction, YA, teen, romance.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2001.
Summary: The novel is about four high school students who have been best friends from birth: Lena, Tibby, Bridget, and Carmen, and a pair of jeans that miraculously fits them all. They share the "traveling pants" among themselves over the summer while they are separated. Lena spends the summer with her grandparents on Santorini. During her stay, her grandmother attempts to matchmake her with a man by the name of Kostos. Tibby spends the summer working at a Wallman's store, planning to film a documentary. She meets a 12-year-old girl, Bailey, who has leukemia. The two become close friends. Carmen goes to South Carolina to spend the summer with her father, from whom she has grown apart since he and Carmen's mother divorced several years before and learns that he is engaged. Bridget attends a soccer camp in Baja California. While there, she falls for one of the coaches, Eric Richman.
My rating: 8.5/10.
♥ She wanted his profession of feelings to do the trick. She really did. She knew he wanted that too. Whether he spoke the truth or not, he thought he could make her feel better, and he really, really wanted to.
But it wasn't what she needed. Her need was as big as the stars, and he was down there on the beach, so quiet she could hardly hear him.
♥ Maybe, she thought as she walked, Brian McBrian was onto something important. Maybe happiness didn't have to be about the big, sweeping circumstances, about having everything in your life in place. Maybe it was about stringing together a bunch of small pleasures. Wearing slippers and watching Miss Universe contest. Eating a brownie with vanilla ice cream. Getting to level seven in Dragon Master and knowing there were twenty level to go.
Maybe happiness was just a matter of the little upticks - the traffic signal that said "Walk" the second you got there - and downticks - the itchy tag at the back of you collar - that happened to every person in the course of a day. Maybe everybody had the same allotted measure of happiness within each day.
Maybe it didn't matter if you were a world-famous heartthrob or a painful geek. Maybe it didn't matter if your friend was possibly dying.
Maybe you just got through it. Maybe that was all you could ask for.
♥ "Ask me anything," Bailey challenged.
"What are you scared of?" The question got out of Tibby's mouth before she meant to ask it.
Bailey thought. "I'm afraid of time," she answered. She was brave, unflinching in the big Cyclops eye of the camera. There was nothing prissy or self-conscious about Bailey. "I mean, I'm afraid of not having enough time," she clarified. "Not enough time to understand people, how they really are, or to be understood myself. I'm afraid of the quick judgments and mistakes that everybody makes. You can't fix them without time. I'm afraid of seeing snapshots instead of movies."
Tibby looked at her in disbelief. She was struck by this new side of Bailey, this philosophical-beyond-her-years Bailey. Did cancer make you wise? Did those chemicals and X rays supercharge her twelve-year-old brain?
Tibby was shaking her head.
"What?" Bailey asked.
"Nothing. Just that you surprise me every day," Tibby said.
Bailey smiled at her. "I like that you let yourself be surprised."