Sisterhood Everlasting

Hey readers.

I literally JUST finished reading Sisterhood Everlasting, by Ann Brashares and I am so emotionally drained and confused that I feel I have no other option than to sit down and write a fucking review.

So here we go.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is a series of four books chronicling the summer adventures of four teenage best friends. They get into all sorts of shenanigans. They make friends. They fall in love. They lose their virginities. They learn things about themselves. Their parents marry step-parents and have babies. They act in plays. The friends that they made die.

It’s really an eclectic mix of emotions.

The thing about these books is that, though they deal with a lot of really heavy shit, it’s always balanced out, at least a little bit, by humor. Just a little bit. We get to see these silly teenage girls, all very different but all complementary to each other, doing silly things like listening to eighties pop and eating pop-tarts and worshiping a pair of blue jeans with almost religious fervor. Like kids do.

This would be great. A series of four books, funny and meaningful, about coming-of-age.

But then Ann Brashares had an idea.

How about I write a fucking fifth?

And thus we have Sisterhood Everlasting. A book that will tear your heart out through your eyeballs and splatter it all over its travesty-strewn pages. A book that will say “Oh, you want a nice book to read on the beach? Too bad! Now you’re crying hysterically in front of strangers. I did that.”

Sisterhood Everlasting takes place ten years after the end of the fourth Sisterhood book. All the girls are 29 and have jobs and boyfriends and live in all corners of the globe and have much less to do with each others’ lives.  But then, a reunion trip to Greece is organized and they're all so happy! Yayyyy! Let’s all go to Greece!

Spoiler alert: The trip to Greece does not go well.

AND NEITHER DOES ANYTHING ELSE IN THIS BOOK. Nine fucking tenths of this book is just pain and misery and self-doubt and trauma and fear and denial and anger and crazy amounts of fruitless soul-searching.

Seriously. The soul-searching is as deep and descriptive as it is changeable. It’s like these girls change their worldview every half an hour. Which, I guess, is just a little bit accurate.

In fact, it was a bit refreshing to read through the meticulous thought processes these girls went through because honestly, I’ve been through those thought processes before, but just so quickly that I couldn’t truly identify them. Girls think a lot. And change their thoughts a lot. And go through existential crises a lot. It’s confusing, and hard to manage, but somehow Ann Brashares has managed to capture that in this depressing, heart-wrenching, surprisingly up-lifting book. See what I mean?

If you haven’t read The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series, don’t read this book until you do. If you have read The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series, read this book. If you have read The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series, don’t read this book. I’m advising both, since I’m still doing some soul-searching as to whether or not I’m glad I read it.