This is the third book I’ll have going, but I couldn’t resist starting it. I had no idea it even existed, and I need to know where the girls have ended up as grown women.
This series came out when I was still in high school as did the first and second films. I adored everything about them. They’re the quintessential young adult novels for girls. Every teenage girl who reads this is likely to find something identifiable in at least one of the girls.
Like Carmen, I love to write, although I never do it enough these days. I’ve struggled with weight, not always feeling pretty enough or good enough. Like Bee, I lost my mother, though it wasn’t by death. It was her choice and it’s still left a hole inside me that I can’t figure out how to fill. Like Tibby, I climb inside myself when scared, curling into a ball and cutting off those around me. My family is also a little exhausting at times. And like Lena, I hold my feelings inside, refusing to let anyone see them. If I am hurt, I will bear the pain and be kind to your face, crying when I’m out of sight. I love hard, though not nearly as much as she did Kostos. I think in some ways I’m hoping to find my own version of him.
I met these girls when I was a teenager. I read their stories over and over. And last year, Brashares released a book where they are adults. It’s funny because I was the same age as they were in the first book and now they are older than I am in the last one.
This is like meeting old friends again. They’re all scattered apart and out of touch, much like the girls I had close to me when I was a teenager. It’s funny how life thrusts people together and then eases them away from one another until they become strangers. Thankfully, this is a book where things will be wrapped neatly in a bow, or at least I hope so.
My own circle of girlfriends from high school - the ones I sat through with breakups, divorces, deaths, and every teenage devastation - has broken off. We’re mostly in touch, some more than others, but it still makes me sad. Friendships are the hardest relationships to maintain, maybe even more so than romantic ones, but they’re more than worth the trouble.
And now after this awkward trip of nostalgia, I’m returning to these girls’ stories. What is Tibby sending them anyway?!
