sisterhood

After reading the Sisterhood of the Traveling pants by Ann Brashares for the second time, I could not help but to be filled with a sense of bliss. Having friends you know you can count on for anything produces a feeling of happiness unlike any other. As life goes on, these friends become more like sisters. These “sisters” will stick with you through thick and thin. Some might even say that a best friend is really a soul mate; rather than a husband. From this story, one can learn that although, we may at times be separated from our friends, there will always be something that can bring us back together. The “something” in this story is a magical pair of pants that the girls find in the beginning of the story. “How can pants be magic?” one might ask. Well, even though these pants don’t really do anything, they do have the ability to fit four completely different girls with four completely different body types. This was reason enough for this particular sisterhood to purchase the “enchanted jeans”. As the story goes on, the girls go their separate ways for the summer, live their own lives, and experience their own adventures and journeys. As each girl wears the jeans, they experience something different such as love, anger, sadness, and happiness.
As prior mentioned, this story is about four best friends. These girls didn’t really have a choice in whether or not they were going to be best friends however. Their mothers were best friends before the girls were even born. All of the girls were born about the same time, and the mothers went to exercise classes at Gilda’s. Needless to say, Gilda’s is now a sacred place to the girls. In the beginning of the story, all four girls; Carmen, Tibby, Lena, and Bridget are hanging out in Carmen’s room discussing their summer plans when one girl finds a pair of jeans on the dresser. They all end up trying these jeans on, and they fit all four girls. The girls decide these jeans must be magic, so they have a ceremony at Gilda’s. This ceremony is somewhat of a last get together before they all leave for the summer. The girls make up rules for the pants such as you definitely cannot wash them, seeing as it might wash the magic out of them. They also decide that the pants will be mailed from girl to girl. The pants help Carmen in dealing with her estranged father and his new family, they help Bridget in dealing with the death of her mother, they help Lena in finding new love in Greece, and they help Tibby in dealing with the loss of her new friend, Bailey to cancer. The pants also help each girl to learn more about herself and about life in general.
Brashares uses strong visual imagery in order to bring about intense emotion on deep issues in the story. For example, when Carmen is visiting her dad in South Carolina, she finds that he has a new family. One day she comes home and finds her father and his perfect little family eating dinner at the table without her. Brashares uses imagery here to paint the picture of the family. She also uses this imagery to paint the picture of the distraught Carmen. The reader feels a pang of sympathy for Carmen and understands her reasoning for throwing a rock at the window of the dining room of her father’s house. Carmen wants to destroy this picture of happiness. She cannot see why her father could move on and be happy. Another example of Brashares’ imagery would be when she portrays Tibby’s friend Bailey. Bailey has leukemia, and when the image of her sick, pale face in the hospital is painted, the reader cannot help but to feel powerful emotion. As Bailey is dying, we also see the image of Tibby. She is completely devastated over the death of her younger friend, and stays in her room for days. Because of this imagery, emotion is definitely brought out in the reader.