What Parents Should Know
Elements of concern to parents (see Ratings), as well as an
emotional subtext that won't make much sense to younger
readers, mark this series as For Teens Only.
Common Sense Media Review
There are few things teens love as much as melodrama, and
they'll get plenty of it here: Tibby befriends a 12-year-old
with leukemia, Carmen's father has a new family, Lena falls in
love in Greece, and Bridget has her first sexual experience,
which devastates her. But Brashares is simply a better writer
than most of the authors of this kind of literature and, as her
story flits back and forth among the girls, she builds a
reservoir of affection for each character that makes the climax
of each of their stories surprisingly effective.
Though their feelings and crises have a ring of truth to
them, more than the Pants add an element of fantasy. The
friendship among the four girls is the kind every teen (perhaps
every person) longs for but never actually experiences -- rock
solid and dependable, with no rivalries or pettiness to mar it,
filled only with kindness, love, and understanding. But if this
friendship, along with the girls' openness to the world and
their capacity for honest self-appraisal and growth, gives teen
readers something to which to aspire, then this book will
deserve its popularity.
From the book:
When they were all gathered and Bridget stopped
aerobicizing, Carmen began. "On the last night before the
diaspora" -- she paused briefly so everyone could admire her
use of the word -- "we discovered some magic." She felt an
itchy tingle in the arches of her feet. "Magic comes in many
forms. Tonight it comes to us in a pair of pants. I hereby
propose that these pants belong to us equally, that they will
travel to all the places we're going, and they will keep us
together when we are apart."
Common Sense Media is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing information to help parents make media and entertainment choices for their families.
