Book Journal: Sisterhood Everlasting (Spoiler)

I fully admit to being a literary snob but I do enjoy a lot of light reading with engaging, real-life situations, and I remember tuning into Brasheras's Sisterhood series as a teenager. When I saw she had published a fourth (fifth?) one, I grabbed it and finished it in a few hours. Brasheras for me is kind of like the Shrek movies; she started off strong, maintained it in the second book, and then crashed deeply in the subsequent stories, and this path continued it.

Sisterhood Everlasting by Ann Brasheras
It's hard for me to remember what happens in each individual book, and part of that is because of the movies, which sort of combined a lot of their elements. But I do remember two things: 1) Lena and Kostos are meant to be and two) Bridget is kind of annoying. Well those things proved true in this book and they kind of kept me on.

First of all there is a huge spoiler and I'm sorry but it needs to be said: Tibby is dead. There's a red herring leading throughout and it's kind of shocking, but the thing is, this book comes so much later after most people really care about these girls anymore that it isn't that big of a deal. And anyway, it's Tibby...for me anyway, Brasheras seemed to like her least of all (maybe that's why she killed her?) so she never had the same enchantments as her fellow sisters. And I do think that's Brasheras's fault. Bridget was electrifying in that kind of "what the hell are you doing?!" kind of way, and Lena was so interesting with her hot Greek lover, and Carmen was that friend that everyone has and so you loved her anyway. Then there was Tibby. So the death? It's kind of whatever. It isn't until the book ends that you realize it's powerful in a way that shatters their image of a perfect friendship.

Secondly, Carmen is unidentifiable as a skinny New York actress who kind of sucks. So you don't like her anymore. Lena is exactly the same and the resurrected Kostos arc is what kept me interested throughout the entire story. And Bridget is the same too--you know, she acts like a 13 year old, even though she's 30 (?!), and does something kind of epic that you wanna see what happens. If anything the Kostos arc will keep you grounded into this story.

Essentially the death comes early and the rest of it is how the girls deal with it, and then coming to terms about how their lives have arrived at this point, and then at the very end, realizing they won't grow old together, is the emotional heart of it, that unfortunately is missing in a great deal of the body of the book. I blame the amount of years between the books, the movies, and to an extent Brasheras's own treatment of her characters, who she obviously loves and knows well, but for some reason fall short in this installment.

5/10