Girls in Pants - Ann Brashares [95]
7. In both The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and Girls in Pants, Carmen feels she doesn’t belong in her family. How do her feelings differ from those of Bridget, Tibby, and Lena toward their families? Do the girls’ family relationships have an impact on their friendships? Are their perceptions of their situations valid, or do they sometimes overreact?
8. Do you think Lena and Kostos could have a future together? What would you suggest to Lena if she asked you for advice about Kostos and her feelings for him? What could Lena learn from Bridget and Eric’s relationship? What could Bridget learn from Lena?
9. Each of the girls has one person who pushes her toward self-examination this summer. Carmen has Valia, Tibby has Katherine, Lena has Annik, and Bridget has Eric. What does each of the girls learn about herself through these influences? Do you have someone in your life who pushes you to learn new things about yourself?
10. “There was a funny thing about Carmen, and she knew it all too well: She could understand and analyze and predict the exact outcome of her crazy, self-destructive behavior and then go ahead and do it anyway”(begin reading section). What do you think of Carmen’s “Good Carmen vs. Bad Carmen” descriptions? Do certain people draw out a “good” or “bad” version of you? Why?
11. The four girls have very different approaches to relationships and love. By the end of Girls in Pants, three of them have found boyfriends with whom they are happy. Are there similarities in the ways the girls approach the search for love? Differences? Do you think their romantic relationships will change anything, good or bad, about their friendships?
12. The Pants have always provided the girls with confidence and security. If you were a member of the Sisterhood, would you adjust the rules to allow use of the Pants year-round for this first year of college? Why or why not?
A CONVERSATION WITH ANN BRASHARES
Q. Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood takes Bridget, Carmen, Lena, and Tibby through their final summer together before they leave for different colleges. Did writing about this challenging, eye-opening time in the girls’ lives remind you of preparing to leave home for your freshman year? What were some of your expectations for your first year at college?
A. I remember thinking it was a huge deal to go to college. I just knew that my life would never be the same again—that leaving home would effectively divide my life into two parts. And it did. I remember packing my trunk and feeling nostalgic in an almost preemptive way. But then, I’ve always been susceptible to a malady I call over-dread, where you imagine and fear something so exhaustively that the real event, when it arrives, seems relatively easy in comparison. A few of my characters suffer from that same malady, I think.
In leaving home, I relished the opportunity to change everything about myself I ever disliked (quite a list). And yet I also wanted to take my whole self with me. That same incompatibility continues to dog me, as it happens.
Back then, I remember feeling as Carmen does a few times—if you take yourself out of your context of family and hometown and friends, who exactly do you have left?
Q. “Last time they had started at the end. This time they started at the beginning. You couldn’t erase the past. You couldn’t even change it. But sometimes life offered you the opportunity to put it right” (begin reading section). Why did you give Bridget the challenge of Eric all over again, especially in this crucial summer before she leaves her home for a new experience?
A. Bridget is so gifted and so strong, and yet she’s the most fragile of the characters in the Sisterhood. I have yearned to put stable ground under her feet. That process really started in The Second Summer, when she developed