You gotta wash those bloody pants hay. On Brashares’ The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.
Yeah I get it. I’m not a teenage girl. People keep telling me that. I’m a 37 year old dude who’s probably got no business reading young adult books about friendship, cute boys and jeans that make you look dam good, no matter how fat your ass looks. Surely, I want one of those jeans myself, because I tell you, I wear down my pants like a python wrapping its sliminess around its victim before swallowing it whole. Then I go to one of the Indian tailors who can barely speak a word of English and get him to patch it up for me.
The pants is the best part of this book. There are four very different girls in this book with different personalities: Carmen, the intellectual hothead; Bridget, the athlete; Lena, the artistic beauty; and Tibby, the rebel. When they were about to separate away during the summer holidays, they magically found a magical pair of pants, that like I said, fit all of their different body shapes. They will take turns wearing these pants like that ex-boyfriend that smashes all of them without them knowing, except the pants are getting passed around quite liberally. It is a bit polyamorous really.
In their respective adventures, Lena meets a cute boy who might be a stalking pervert (but he’s a hot blacksmith in the Greek islands!), Bridget meets an older coach who’s tossing and turning of getting charged with statutory rape or not, Tibby with an annoying kid with leukemia and Carmen, who probably had it worst, his dad’s new family that he did not tell her about until the very last minute (😱😱😱!!!). But like that crazy uncle that keeps talking to you in the Christmas parties, the pants are there for the girls’ seminal moments.
I really feel nothing for this book, except for that gut-wrenching cringe that you often get reading young adult books. The dialogues are trash, the supposive tender and poignant moments are laughable and I really don’t like any of the characters. And I think it is because of the cheap overuse of the dialogue, that like countless young adult books, doesn’t sound like real conversations. If I don’t find you believable, I shit sure won’t find you likeable.
Also, did I tell you that they plan to never wash them pants? What examples are you going to set to your young readers about hygiene? I hope in their later sequels, the pants will somehow magically get washed, even if it means if one of the characters got too drunk and slipped in a dam and accidentally drowned.
But hey, if this is one of those books that you started reading as a teenager, and starts you off on a lifetime of reading hopefully better books, then power to you. I just can’t wait to not read the rest of the sequels.
