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The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

Book Summary

Reviewed by Matt Berman

The girls embark on another dramatic summer. Tibby goes off to a film school summer program, where she will confront her relationships with her mother, her sort-of-boyfriend Brian, and her late friend Bailey. Bridget goes to Alabama under an alias to reestablish contact with her maternal grandmother and delve into her own and her late mother's past.

Lena discovers things in her mother's past that she'd rather not know, and goes back to Greece for her grandfather's death, and to find out why Kostos has broken off their relationship. And Carmen, having ripped apart and resewn her relationship with her father in the previous book, now does the same with her mother, who has fallen in love.

Is It Any Good?

3

Brashares is a strong writer, and the scenes and events flash easily by, imbued with good and important lessons that are not too didactic. Fans of the first book, and there are lots of them, will certainly want to follow the girls' melodrama into its second summer, and will be enthralled as their favorite characters plow through their trials and tribulations.

Don't try to read this without having read the first book -- much of what happens to the girls this summer builds on events from before. There's more of everything here: more pages (almost 100 pages longer than the first one), more peripheral characters (so many that it's sometimes hard to keep track), more tears, more dark and selfish behavior, more graphic make-out scenes, even the Pants travel around more, though they are less central to the plot. But sometimes more is less, and even fans may find they're less involved with the characters here, who are often less sympathetic and less dependent on each other. Still, for frothy summer romance reading, teens could do a lot worse than this.

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