51 pages • 1-hour read
Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
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Prologue-Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
The novel opens with Carmen Lowell narrating in first person. She describes her bond with her best friends, Bridget Vreeland, Lena Kaligaris, and Tabitha “Tibby” Rollins. The girls’ mothers met in a prenatal aerobics class at Gilda’s gym, and they’ve been inseparable since birth. Even after the bonds between their mothers dissolved, they remain close. Carmen says that each of her friends fits into an archetype: Bridget is athletic, Tibby rebellious, and Lena beautiful. She’s unsure where she herself fits.
Carmen introduces “the Traveling Pants” (11), a pair of blue jeans that she found in a thrift store that somehow fit each girl perfectly. All four girls share the pants, seeing them as a symbol of their commitment to remaining friends forever.
Chapter 1 Summary
Carmen, Lena, Bridget, and Tibby gather in Carmen’s room to help her pack for her upcoming trip. It will be their first-ever summer apart: Carmen is headed to South Carolina to visit her father, Bridget to Baja California in Mexico for soccer camp, and Lena to Oia, Greece, to visit her grandparents along with her little sister Effie. Only Tibby is staying home in Bethesda, Maryland, to work at Wallman’s, a local drugstore.
Tibby picks up the thrifted jeans, which Carmen has been planning to throw away. She, Lena, and Bridget each try them on and are surprised to find that they flatter each girl despite their different body types. Carmen is hesitant to try them on because she has a curvier build than her friends, but to her surprise the pants also fit her perfectly. Lena dubs them “magic pants.”
At Bridget’s suggestion, the girls decide to bless the pants in a ceremony of friendship. They sneak into Gilda’s, where they lay the pants out in a circle of candles and vow to become “Sisters of the Pants” (19). They plan to send the pants back and forth to one another all summer, each keeping them for a total of two weeks.
Chapter 2 Summary
Tibby gets ready for her first shift at Wallman’s. She envies her guinea pig, Mimi, who never has to work. Tibby judges her own wellbeing by how much time she spends with Mimi; if she is happy and busy, she is rarely in her room, but during periods of sadness she can stare into Mimi’s cage for hours.
On the way to work, Tibby spots her crush, the handsome and popular Tucker Rowe. She is humiliated to be seen in her ugly Wallman’s smock. Though she anticipates a boring and miserable summer, she is relieved to at least be escaping the chaotic presence of her baby siblings, Katherine and Nicky.
Bridget arrives in Bahía Concepción, where she meets her fellow campers and bonds with two girls named Diana and Ollie. She goes swimming alone in the ocean, feeling exhilarated.
On the plane to South Carolina, Carmen eagerly anticipates a summer with her father. Since her parents’ divorce when she was seven, he has always made time to come visit her, but this is the first time she’ll be staying with him. She looks forward to spending time in his apartment and doing their favorite father-daughter activities together. Carmen writes a letter to Tibby, stating that she is being “a little bit Tibby” in her absence (26).
Chapter 3 Summary
Lena and Effie arrive in the town of Oia in Santorini and meet their grandparents, who they call Grandma and Bapi Kaligaris. While Grandma speaks fluent English, Bapi only speaks Greek, and Lena is embarrassed by her inability to communicate with him. Grandma fawns over Lena’s beauty, which makes her uncomfortable. In a letter to Carmen, she writes, “I feel like I should love them right away […] but you can’t make yourself love someone” (33).
At Wallman’s, Tibby attends orientation. She is amused by one of her coworkers, a woman with exceptionally long fingernails. Tibby clashes instantly with her manager, Duncan. He reprimands her several times and accuses her of stealing when she borrows a role of tape to set up a deodorant display. Privately, she plans to make him the star of her “suckumentary,” a documentary film that will satirize the “ridiculous” lives of her Wallman’s coworkers.
Chapter 4 Summary
Lena prepares for dinner party hosted by her grandparents, while Effie helps in the kitchen. Lena thinks that she and Effie put on a “turtle-and-hare-show” (36); while Lena’s beauty captures strangers’ eyes at first, she struggles to connect with people due to her introverted personality. By contrast, extroverted Effie makes friends easily. Lena decides to wear the traveling pants to the party, but Grandma advises her to dress up because a boy named Kostos Dounas will be attending the party. Lena suspects that her grandparents are trying to set her up with Kostos and begins to dread meeting him.
Carmen meets her father at the airport. Expecting to be taken to his small one-bedroom apartment, she is surprised when he instead drives her to a large Victorian in a suburban neighborhood. A blonde woman and two teenagers answer the door; Carmen’s father introduces them as his fiancé Lydia and her children, Paul and Krista. Carmen is shocked and upset but feigns excitement for fear of disappointing her father. She retreats to the guest bedroom to write a letter to Bridget, in which she states that she feels like “a guest […] of a family that will never be mine” (41).
Chapter 5 Summary
Lena reluctantly attends the party. Grandma introduces her to Kostos, who is tall, handsome, and at least 18. Kostos attends college in London but is staying in Oia over the summer to help his grandfather, Bapi Dounas, at the local forge. Kostos is friendly to Lena, but Lena doesn’t trust him—she has experienced too many men pretending to be her friend only to reveal ulterior motives. Lena attempts to pawn Kostos off on Effie, but Kostos is only interested in her. He invites her to see the island with him and is disappointed when she declines.
At soccer camp, the campers meet their coaches. Bridget is instantly drawn to Eric, an attractive 19-year-old college sophomore. The girls are divided into teams, and Bridget is disappointed not to be in Eric’s group. She makes a point of letting her hair down as she jogs past him and is pleased that he clearly notices her. In a letter to Carmen, she jokes that she’s fallen in love already.
Prologue-Chapter 5 Analysis
The Prologue introduces readers to the central characters: friends Carmen Lowell, Tibby Rollins, Bridget Vreeland, and Lena Kaligaris. Carmen is the only character to narrate in the first person, implying that she is a voice of authority within her friend group. Carmen is keenly aware of how rare and significant their bond is; she calls herself “the one who cares the most […] that we stick together” (11). Through Carmen’s narration, Brashares impresses upon readers The Role of Friendship in Identity Formation.
The Prologue also introduces the traveling pants, a pair of blue jeans shared by all four girls. Brashares employs magical realism by having the pants fit each girl perfectly, despite their vastly different body types. The girls half-seriously dub them “magical” pants. Though their unlikely ability to fit everyone is a novelty, the true magic of the pants lies in what they symbolize—the unbreakable bond between the four friends. As Bridget says in the Prologue, the pants “stand for the promise we made to one another, that no matter what happens, we stick together” (10). Even when they are apart, they lean on one another, as evidenced by Carmen’s claim that she will act more like Tibby while in South Carolina.
The pants are the only element of magical realism in the novel. Bridget, Lena, Carmen, and Tibby are ordinary teenage girls, experiencing the typical highs and lows of adolescence. Carmen’s narration establishes the positive characteristics that they recognize and love in one another: Tibby is witty and rebellious, Lena is kind-hearted and compassionate, Bridget is a confident and talented athlete, and Carmen is the mature, introspective glue that holds them together.
The girls are also aware of one another’s shortcomings. Tibby is prone to superficial judgements of other people, though she can turn off her judgements when it comes to her friends. Bridget is known to act recklessly, while Lena is self-conscious about her looks and prefers to stay firmly within her comfort zone. Carmen, who is of American and Puerto Rican heritage, is unsure about where she fits into the world, demonstrated by the way she easily assigns each of her friends an archetype but dubs herself “Carmen the…what?” (10). When she feels left out or insulted, she struggles to contain her temper. In using each character’s point of view to flesh out the characters of her friends, Brashares highlights how their collective identity informs their individual self-concepts.
The narrative touches on the common YA trope of first love. Lena and Bridget both meet potential love interests early on, though they approach them differently in ways true to their characters. Lena, who distrusts men instinctually, is standoffish toward Kostos, while Bridget brazenly flirts with Eric. Romantic love is not the only form of connection explored in the novel, however, as Brashares explores The Complexity of Familial Relationships. Adolescence can be a particularly fraught time for families, and each of the novel’s main characters experience challenges in their relationships with their families. Carmen, whose parents are long divorced, is blindsided by her father’s plans to get re-married. In the wake of her mother’s death, Bridget’s relationship with her father and brother is implied to be less than close. Tibby feels ignored by her parents in favor of her younger siblings, and in Greece, Lena’s grandparents fail to live up to the fantasy she’s spun based on the stories she grew up hearing; she worries when she “can’t make [herself] love [them]” (33) instantly. Brashares explores several different types of love, establishing the theme of Love and Vulnerability.
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is a coming-of-age narrative. Over the course of their summer apart, each of the girls will experience hardships and learn lessons that will develop them into more mature versions of themselves. As they prepare to separate for the summer, Carmen notes that the girls are so close as to sometimes feel that “we form one single complete person rather than four separate entities” (10). On their own, they will be challenged to become their own people while maintaining the strength of their bond.
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