FINISHED: The Second Summer of the Sisterhood ➜ Ann Brashares.

Synopsis: With a bit of last summer’s sand in the pockets, the Traveling Pants and the Sisterhood that wears them embark on their 16th summer.

Bridget: Impulsively sets off for Alabama, wanting to both confront her demons about her family and avoid them all at once.

Lena: Spends a blissful week with Kostos, making the unexplainable silence that follows his visit even more painful.

Carmen: Is concerned that her mother is making a fool of herself over a man. When she discovers that her mother borrowed the Pants to wear on a date, she’s certain of it.

Tibby: Not about to spend another summer working at Wallman’s, she takes a film course only to find it’s what happens off-camera that teaches her the most.

My first review of 2018! And it’s only the 4th!!

No really, I figured that if I read at least 15% of my book every day, there’s no way I can fall behind this year. IT SHOULD WORK.

But anyway.

Good GOD, the first half of this book was fucking unbearable. Like – alright, I get it, these are 16 year old kids who are still working out how to feel feelings and do life right, but, FUCKING CHRIST. This is a whole new level of shitty and just goddamn stupid. How fucking insufferable it all was and how easy it felt that it could all be fixed if any of them would just take their heads out of their butts and SEE CLEARLY is what knocked off the first star.

What knocked off the second is the shitty gendered language that didn’t even get challenged, all the fat shaming, generalized hive-mind statements like “women tended to take the size to the fitting room they wish they were instead of the size they actually are” sprinkled all OVER the story, a noted use of the word “retarded,” implying that to be suicidal is to be “weak” and “give up too easily” even a little bit (while never actually using the phrase “Bridget’s mom committed suicide”), and probably a couple other specific things I can’t remember right now but bookmarked in my brain as “YEP there’s ANOTHER awful thing.” I mean, I specifically remember the point where I went “YEP this book just fell down to three stars.” So yeah.

So, the only redeeming factors are that the INSUFFERABLE parts only went on for the first half of the book. Once you reach the second part, it tones down considerably as character development hits and all four girls actually become decent functional people. (I may take that back about Bee – she was the one who had it the most together and seemed the most understandable and was *not* a toxic human being during most of the book. So I actually take it all back about Bee. She was okay. I liked her a lot.)

And the ending was cute, all things considered, and the character development was actually quite nice and felt fair, and I really liked the focus on mother-daughter relationships.

So, even though I didn’t enjoy it at ALL like I did when I first read it at 16 (it must have annoyed me even then for me to give it four stars at the time), and at one point I actually faced the very sad realization that I might not want to continue this series (see the entire first half), by the time the book ended I still enjoyed it enough to want to move on to book three.

I’M STILL JUST EXCITED I ALREADY FINISHED MY FIRST BOOK THO.

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