Teen-girl readers snap up 'Summer' sequel
By Deidre Donahue
USA Today
A bit of advice for J.K. Rowling, courtesy of baseball great Satchel Paige: "Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you."
In the intensively competitive arena of young-adult fiction, the writer to watch is American Ann Brashares, 36. Her new novel, "The Second Summer of the Sisterhood" (Delacorte, $15.95), is a sequel to Brashares' runaway 2001 success, "The Summer of the Traveling Pants."
Ann Brashares started writing three years ago.
Selected as the Book Sense Book of the Year in the children's literature category, it has close to 600,000 copies in the United States and Canada. (Of course, that is far fewer than the 190 million copies that Rowling's "Harry Potter" series has sold worldwide.) The sequel hit stores with a first printing of 200,000. Rights to the second book have been sold in 17 countries.
Clair Kettler, 15, and her sister, Brooke, 11, of Washington, D.C., are huge fans. Notes Clair, who has read the first book twice, "It's one of those books that you see sitting in your room and you can't help but pick up and flip open to any page and just start reading. I really like it because it relates to a lot of the things going on in my life, and my friends."
Her sister observes, "I really like being able to feel like you are sharing the feelings of one, or more, of the characters."
Not too shabby an accomplishment for a former Barnard College philosophy major, book editor and Manhattan-based mother of three children, all under age 8. She did not start writing until three years ago. Brashares' novels have nothing to do with wizards and wands, and "Pants" is a book read almost entirely by girls. But there is a certain element of magic.
In the books, four teenage girls in suburban Maryland are fast friends literally since birth: Their moms took a prenatal aerobics class together. One of the quartet suggests it might have something to do with being bounced on their heads too often.
Though the mothers are no longer a group, the bond among Tibby, Bridget, Lena and Carmen remains tight. Cementing that friendship is a pair of thrift-shop jeans that fits each girl perfectly, making each of them feel beautiful and desirable, despite their very different bodies.
"I love the transformational quality of clothes," says Brashares, who credits a former colleague who told her about how she and a group of pals shared a pair of jeans.
And the enchantment extends to practical matters like laundry: "These are magical jeans that don't need to be washed," Brashares says. "It requires an element of imagination."
Reached at her home in New York, Brashares notes that the book touches on the fantasy of having a really close group of friends in which each person is equally tight with each member.
The two novels explore contemporary issues:
- Bridget, a striking blonde and elite soccer player, blocks out her memories of her mother's suicide.
- Tibby, a sullen rebel, has parents who have evolved from hippies to acquisitive, harried, two-career boomers. They apparently cannot see their oldest child as anything but a free baby-sitter.
- Lena, the older daughter of Greek emigrants, struggles with an unusual burden. She is stunningly beautiful. Almost paralyzed by the attention, she retreats emotionally from the world.
- Carmen, the only child of a divorced couple, is enraged by her father's remarriage and her mother's blossoming romance.
While her own childhood was very different, Brashares said, she identifies strongly with Carmen's anger, Tibby's desire to be cool and Lena's shyness.
