Author: Ann Brashares
Publisher: Random House
Rating: WARTY!
This is a classical example of Big Publishing™ hiring a dickhead to design a cover, and the dickhead hasn't a clue what's in the book. It's not Girls in Skimpy Shorts. It's not Girls in Daisy Dukes. It's Girls in Pants and the pants are blue jeans, moron publishing incorporated.
Here's yet another novel I picked up without having any idea that it's not the first in a series I didn't know existed anyway. Do publishers do this deliberately - I mean put out sequential novels without giving potential readers any idea that this novel isn't the first in the series? Why? I did eventually garner for myself the sneaking suspicion that this was the same thing as the movie The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, but I'd already brought the audio book home from the library by then.
Now this is a movie I wouldn't watch in a million years. I love reading novels about women and by women (unless they're unlawfully awful, of course), but any title that has the word 'sisterhood' in it is out, because I know for a fact that it's going to be nothing but cringe-worthy crap posing as "literature" and supplicating for obscure and pretentious awards.
This is to explain how I ended up watching a movie that I wouldn't watch in a million years. Not knowing that this novel was part of a series, the first of which was indeed titled The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (and from which the movie derived) I thought the movie was taken from this novel and the title simply changed because that's what Hollywood does best. I was wrong. I was wrong. I was wrong, wrong wrong! Can you save me...?
Normally in this situation, and assuming I liked the material, I'd do a joint movie-novel review, but you don't get that if you don't visit my blog. Since I only review movies that I like, you don't get that if I don't like the movie, either, so this was never going to happen once I'd watched this movie, which turned out to be precisely what I thought it would be, and re-verified my distance from such movies with one ping only Vasili.
There were some humorous moments in the movie, I admit, but not that many, and I adored the soccer scenes, but really nothing else. The really enjoyable scenes were few and far between. I did think, though, that Blake Lively made a great model for my own character Janine Majeski, in my novel Seasoning, although Janine is British of Polish ancestry as opposed to Lively's character, who's presumably American and of Dutch ancestry based on her name.
Which brings us to the story here. This is the third (as I learned!) in a series about four girlfriends. I haven't read any other volumes, nor do I wish to now! The four girls are: Lena Kaligaris, Carmen Lowell, Tibby Rollins, and Bridget Vreeland. Some time before, having found "magical pants" which fit them all perfectly despite their differing figures, the girls form a sisterhood of the pants and make up oddball rules for it. They promise, despite their being apart for the summer, to wear the pants by turns, and report back on their adventures.
I know this history because of the movie, but it makes no sense. The movie claims that these girls were fated to be friends since their moms all attended the same yoga class whilst pregnant, and the girls were all born within a week of one another, but they're so very different in behaviors, wants, needs and temperament that their friendship makes no sense to begin with.
Neither from the movie nor the novel did I get any idea as to why these girls even tolerated each other, much less wanted to hang out together. They were all chalk and cheese and not even quality chalk - but that hard nasty kind that screeches on the board rather than flows with a powder-lubricated glide. And the cheese wasn't even nice cheese but that overly crumbly, stinky kind that in addition to its natural odor, has gone way past its best.
Given the pure fiction that they did hang out together, their summers apart made zero sense. Why did they not fight to spend their summers together if they were so "inseparable"? - for example, why did they not all go to Greece with Lena or to soccer camp with Bridget? They didn't have to play soccer, they could have just hung out. But that's the movie. Let's look at the novel.
In this third novel, Lena is stuck taking care of her bitch of a grandmother, Valia, who desperately needs Valium. Lena is taking a summer art class, but her bitch of a father, who hates art (particularly nude guys), cuts funding so she cannot attend. I don't get how that works. Was he paying weekly? It doesn't work like that. You pay for the summer class and you're done. How cutting funding would enter into it is a mystery. Was he paying in installments? I want a summer class like that! And if he hates art, why did he even start paying? Bad writing explains all this. Bad writing and poor editing is why.
We're somehow supposed to be edified by Lena's deep insights into her family garnered miraculously from nothing but charcoal and art-grade paper as she tries to put together a portfolio (a starboard folio being completely out of the question of course) for a scholarship, but none of this makes sense unless you're supplicating for obscure and pretentious "literature" awards.
Carmen meets a typical trope teen studly dude with a typical trope teen studly dude name of Win Sawyer. Seriously? Doubtlessly he's in the hospital because his hair keeps falling into his eyes and his muscles are sore from rubbing together across his broad shoulders so much. This relationship renders Carmen a complete moron.
Tibby (seriously, Tibby? Is this girl four years old? And a kitten?) had a moment when she was thinking about Brian (her boyfriend) and the changing nature of their relationship which I enjoyed, but even that was soon swamped by maunder and bullshit over her younger sister's dumb-ass injury and Tibby's dumb-ass cluelessness as to root cause.
Bridget's nonsense is about as artificial as it gets, finding herself not only in the same venue as Eric yet again - the guy she moronically fell for (or which her panties fell for, at least) in volume one - but also that she's actually partnered with him. I may not be recalling this accurately since at this point, coincidence-nausea rendered me as ill as Bridget became when she had her NGRF (non-genitalia-related fever). Here's where Le Stupide maxed out so calamitously that it destroyed my moronometer. Brashares owes me a new one.
pop quiz: What is the correct procedure for taking care of a feverishly sick teen?
- Call her parents and take her to the nearest ER?
- Tell no one, but take this underage girl into your own cabin when you are the authority figure in her life, and hope she gets better?
- Dance a jig, burn incense, and swathe her in herbs hoping for a cure?
- Pray and do nothing else because gods are magic?
I'm sorry but this novel is too stupid to live.
