2012 A Year in Books

Sisterhood Everlasting by Ann Brashares

This is book number five in the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants  series.  I'm a sucker for finishing a series, often despite my better judgment.  In this final installment of the series, the girls have gone their own way and have truly entered adulthood.  Carmen is an actress in New York with a jerky fiancee, Tibby is in Australia with Brian, Bridget is in San Francisco with Eric and Lena is a struggling, lonely artist in Rhode Island.  The girls have definitely lost touch with one another. Then they get word from Tibby that they need to all meet back in Greece, where the pants were last seen.

The girls all gather in Santorini and barely have time to reconnect when tragedy strikes.  Tibby drowns in the caldera, leaving behind what seems very much like a suicide note.  The girls completely lose themselves in their grief. They stop turning to one another and close themselves off from everyone else in their lives.  Of course, other than Carmen, none of them seem to have met many new people since they were 16.  

I'm not sure how you can take 4 women who traveled and had goals and dreams and skills and throw them to the winds and then make them completely fail to thrive.  Lena is pathetic. Carmen, who was the heart and soul of the group, is just proud and shallow now, Bridget is a basket case whose only way to deal with any problem is to run away. Tibby turned out to have been the most solid and mature one of the bunch.  

I checked this out from my library as an audio book. I can not imagine that I would have wasted my precious reading time on this.  But, my commute is already frustrating and since I'm being held captive in the car, I will often times grab an audiobook that I wouldn't bother to read in any other format.  I wanted to shake these girls for most of the book.  In book one of the series, they were teen-aged girls with immense talents.  The farewell book is essentially a view into the completely stalled lives of 3 twenty something women. It was sad and pathetic and those characters deserved much better.