The Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pants

Getting Through the Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pants

I spent about a week going through back issues of Teen Vogue and various fan forums trying to track down where to actually get the paperback edition that wasn't a special print run. The hardcover first edition from Nan A. Talese will set you back around forty dollars on Amazon if you can find one in decent shape. The mass market paperback is usually under six bucks at any big box bookstore or on Amazon used. The book itself came out in 2001 and follows four friends who discover a pair of jeans that fits each of them perfectly despite their different body types. It was adapted into a film in 2005 starring Amber Tamblyn, Blake Lively, Alexz Johnson, and Ariel Gade. There were two sequels as well, released in 2008 and 2014.

Where to Download The Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pants

The e-book version is available on Kindle, Apple Books, and Kobo for around eight dollars. There isn't an official free version unless you count your local library's digital lending through Libby or OverDrive. I'd recommend using the library option since it's free and legal. The audiobook is also solid if you prefer that route, narrated by a full cast which adds a bit more to the experience than a single narrator would. The main issue people run into is that some of the later editions have slightly different content. The original 2001 hardcover and the first paperback printing are essentially identical, but the 10th anniversary edition from 2011 includes a new afterword that changes the ending slightly. If you're looking for the original text, make sure you're not grabbing the anniversary edition by accident. I learned this the hard way after buying the anniversary version online and then realizing the final chapter played out differently than what I remembered from my copy. The plot centers on Tibby, Lena, Veronica, and Carmen spending their first summer apart after middle school. Each girl gets the pair of magical pants. Lena goes to Greece and falls for a photographer's son. Veronica teams up with an older woman at her dad's beach house. Carmen deals with her parents' divorce while learning to dance. Tibby stays home and bonds with a new neighbor who has lost his wife. The pants travel between them somehow, and the story follows how each girl changes through that summer.

If you're trying to track down merchandise or related items, the movie tie-ins from the mid-2000s are everywhere on eBay and Mercari. The original book merchandising was pretty limited compared to some other YA franchises, so you won't find a ton of official goods from the initial release period. The biggest problem I've seen with this property is that people expect the book and movie to be the same thing. They're not. The novel is roughly two hundred pages longer and covers more internal monologue, especially from Carmen's perspective. The movie compresses a lot of the character development into quicker scenes. If you're reading it for the first time after watching the film, you'll notice the gaps. The book gives you much more of Carmen's family situation and her relationship with her father, which the movie handles more lightly. There's also a spin-off book series called Sisterhood Guides that came out starting in 2007, but those are more like advice books for teenagers rather than continuation novels. They're not connected to the main story arc. Some people get confused about this and think they're reading the next chapter when they're actually reading separate content. The main series ended with the third book and movie, and there have been no further installments officially announced.