Four friends, four summers apart, four novels, and one pair of very special pants . During their summers apart, the pants travel from girl to girl and unite them while they discover who they are as individuals.

By: Tessa Perkins (Vancouver Correspondent - Canada)

Four friends, four summers apart, four novels, and one pair of very special pants. Tibby, Carmen, Bridget, and Lena are all very different people, in personality and looks, but somehow this one pair of jeans fits each of them perfectly. During their summers apart, the pants travel from girl to girl and unite them while they pursue their own goals and discover who they are as individuals.  

Each novel is wonderfully wrote and focuses equally on each of the four girls' lives. Although there are a lot of coming of age teen series, this one stands out because it has something for everyone to relate to, and an intriguing premise that makes their friendship all the more special. The reader starts to feel affection for each of the characters, and in a way their hopes and dreams become those of the reader. While these girls grow up together, the readers of this series have grown too, and now that the last book has been released, and the second and final movie has also hit theatres, we have a chance to look back on our own lives and realize that we too have grown up and changed along the way.

The first film, which was based on the first novel by Ann Brashares and released in 2005, followed the story lines of the novel closely and represented the characters' unique personalities very well. Amber Tamblyn (Tibby), Blake Lively (Bridget), Alexis Bledel (Lena), and America Ferrera (Carmen) fit their roles splendidly and brought the characters to life. The film was exactly as I had imagined it would be. When I heard that there was to be a sequel to this film, I expected that it would be based on the second book (a logical but incorrect assumption). The second film reunites these four actresses and attempts to cram three novels worth of information, pain, triumph, love, and growing up into a barely two hour movie. Their method is to take pieces of the second and third book and insert them into the fourth novel while leaving parts of the fourth novel out with some alterations. The result is a craftily made shortened version of the events as if only to appease the sisterhood lovers in the cheapest and easiest way possible.  

Anyone who has took the time to read all of the books, or even just the fourth book, will be dizzy at the amount of time shifting and story warping that takes place in the film. It begins with a short summary of the events that have happened since we last saw the girls in the first film then cuts straight to them being in college. The girls are only together in the beginning and end of the film which creates added tension that is not felt as much while reading the book because it is not as restricted by a time limit or requirement to fit in too much information. The events do fit together in a way but seem as aimless and disconnected as the girls are on their individual journeys.

With so many alterations and non-chronological events, the second movie feels a bit forced as though it is a summary or recap of all the events, but this time they are all happening at once. As much as I enjoyed the novels and loved seeing them brought to the big screen, the second film did not do them justice and felt like a quickly spun attempt at pacifying the fans of this series. Of course, it is still worth seeing to a Sisterhood Of The Travelling Pants fan, even purchasing to make your collection "complete," but as a warning to all those non-readers: the events of the film do not truly reflect those of the novels and there is little time to feel as much empathy for the characters because the film jumps quite quickly from one storyline to another to ensure that it will all fit into the allotted time.  

Now that the sisterhood has come to an end, and the pants are no more, one might ask: what next? Ann Brashares has already got something lined up to be released early next year. Her newest novel will be called: 3 Willows: The Sisterhood Grows and will continue the legacy of the four girls from the previous novels but introduce new characters into their former high school. Thus a new generation of the sisterhood is born, perennial as ever. We must wait and see if these new characters will have the power to hold our attention and influence our lives, or if those pants were meant to travel around only one sisterhood.