After four summers of reading about a pair of traveling pants being shipped all across the world, connecting four teenagers who had been best friends since birth, Anne Brashers brought the emotional journey to an end by writing about a traumatic and shocking fifth and final summer. As a tremendous Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants fan, who has read all of the previous novels of this series and seen the two movies preceding them, I could not have asked for a more spectacular way to lay the series to rest. This novel has the ability to move anybody willing to shed tears, laugh, get frustrated, and feel.

The start of Sisterhood Everlasting is somewhat slow. In the previous four books, the girls are ten years younger, and the first fifty pages of the novel is spent recapping what happened in those ten years before and some of what the four best friends have done in those ten years. These moments were not as captivating as the moments to come. This may seem redundant at first, but this ends up being crucial to the ending of the book, so if you are considering putting the book down because you are fine with the pants being lost and Tibby, Lena, Bridget and Carmen coming to terms with this in the last chapter of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants: The
Fourth Sisterhood, do not! The first fifty pages may have been disappointing, but they do not set the mood for the following pages.

One aspect of this book that was a nice change from the last four books of the series was the unimportance the pants had to this storyline. In the previous books, the significance of the pants was always a shared bond between them, but since the pants were now gone they only had their friendship to rely on. In this fifth chapter of the series, the issue is that they have drifted with time and there is nothing there to keep them together since they have lost the pants. This suited the title well since this title is the only title in the series to not have the phrase “traveling pants.” The significance of the absence of the pants as a symbol of the bond between them would have been severed if they were included in the title.
Anne Brashers did an excellent job of keeping the reader guessing and creating mindboggling suspense, which kept me up until after three o’clock some mornings, for the mere fact that I was far to intrigued in the book to even contemplate waiting until the next morning to learn what the next twist would be or if my assumptions were correct. Although it did not seem to be the case at first, everything that happens is not as it seems, such as the death of Tibby and the way in which Brashers ties everything together in the end to fit like a puzzle is outstanding.
Anger and frustration are common feelings that may occur while reading Sisterhood Everlasting, for example feeling anger towards Tibby for thinking she abandoned her friends (Brashers 145), or at Lena for being so hesitant to follow her heart (255). These emotions that Brashers created are main reason why the book is
so powerful and moving. Without these emotions, the message of the novel would not properly be conveyed. Brashers made her audience truly feel and relate to the characters and what they were going through, although not all have ever had to experience something as traumatic as the loss of a best friend.
The entire novel not only demonstrates sexual love or desire, but also a love that is so powerful it can change a persons life and that is the kind of love that is present between these women. This love got them through the most difficult loss of their life, and the demonstration of this love gives us the hope we need to get through times like this. Not only were the words of this book meant for entertainment, but they were also meant for a much more significant purpose, and that is learning to love in such a way that can conquer the most difficult situations. Brashers did just this, and coming from somebody who reads many books and not always has a book speak to me, this book made me feel indescribable emotions that had me crying because of one page, but laughing out loud at the very next page. This novel was certainly worth my time and everything about it was incredible. It was the perfect ending to a great series.