An Awe-Inspiring Book Review of The Sisterhood...of the Traveling Pants

Angelina Hendley                                                

Mr. Coates

Bestsellers

1 March 2011

Hot reads, for girls!

            It’s natural to enjoy happy, easy-reads that portray the kind of person you are in a positive light. That’s probably why this “chic-lit” is such a popular story among younger teenage girls. Ann Brashares created the kind of characters that are strong, bold and independent high school girls. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. What are the traveling pants? They are the magical element of the story that symbolize the unbreakable connection between four best friends. The story just breathes summer. It makes the reader long for the beaches, and then want to be in Greece the next second because all of their adventures seem exciting. It’s like this snapshot of an incredible summer that is captured in these pages, and while reading letters about the girls adventures and thoughts, you become part of the Sisterhood. This is the perfect kind of genre to get young girls excited to read more. It has more positive and easy-to-understand language and makes typical events or people seem remarkable.

            The characterization in The Help and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants was phenomenal. I cringed when I read about Hilly eating that pie from Minny, and I felt Lena’s shame and embarrassment when she admitted her feelings to Kostos. The characters in their interactions with one another in each book helped me see the bigger picture that the authors were trying to show. The Help itself had a way deeper storyline and its writing style was very unique since it had the dialect of the way the black maids spoke in the South. I really liked the fact that both books had multiple different points of view. It was more meaningful for the reader because he or she could understand what was happening to different people at the same time. So what did I really get from each book? While I observed the female characters on their personal journeys, I deciphered the meaning of all these independent characters doing extraordinary things and taking painstaking measures to achieve their goals. It’s as if they’re calling out to their fellow audience to listen to their stories and setting an example of how powerful a woman really is. This is a major theme in The Help. Not only are blacks crave more power and equal rights, black woman are stuck in a cycle and finally get the chance to claw their way through white prejudice and show the world what Jackson, Mississippi is really like. The sisters in The Sisterhood of the Traveling pants also make a powerful impact on their own lives and the people’s around them. They aspire to be seen and their voices heard. They also demand the kind of attention from friends and strangers alike that most teens probably don’t get. The philosophy? Why wait for others to fix problems when you could do it yourself . . . ?   Granted, they didn’t always do what was right, but at least they followed their heart and let people know what they were feeling. When Carmen was angry, she threw a rock at her Dad’s new family’s house and broke a window while they were eating dinner. I love the way the voices of all the characters are so honest all the time. “I am mad at my dad. I am *mad* at my dad. Why is that so hard for me to see, Tibby? I have no problem being mad at you.” Trusting Carmen is so easy because she is a more gushy type of narrator who acts out impulsively on her feelings and shares everything, unlike the other girls. While the writing of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is just “average,” it’s really the voices of the girls that wins the reader over. It’s the friendship, love and courage in everything they do and feel that that celebrates being a strong, beautiful girl living her own life.  “Wear them. They'll make you brave.” And while these teenage girls have so much faith in a pair of magical pants that fits them all perfectly, the maids from The Help share stories and put their faith in a book that will change their lives forever.

             If I had to rate The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants in relation to other books of its type, I would give it 4 out of 5 stars. In comparison to all the great books in the world? Maybe a 2.5 . . . It is fun and entertaining and free and lively and warm, but on a level that is trumped by other great books of this age. And I’m not referring to Nicholas Sparks or Sarah Desson, I mean well-written books that have survived time and have artistic value. They are more complex, without a doubt, and the time invested into a story like Pride and Prejudice will definitely be more fruitful than time invested into something like The Last Song or Dear John. Blaghh. Yes, to a young person, this book is perfect level and depth-wise. For someone who fancies deeper, more artistic stories, not so much.

(Movie adaptation trumps the book!!!!) watch trailerJ but be warned…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHULbEtbUTo

Book Trailer

Top 5 favorite books

Spotlight on the Star

It is in a way, a sort of crazy spirit that both Bridget from The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and Britney Spears both have. It can't be contained and demands a large audience from anyone around them. Bridget went to summer camp to play soccer and show off her star abilities. Everyone was entranced by her beautiful long blond hair and the power that seemed to emanate every time she zoomed on the soccer field or scored a goal. It’s the way that Bridget holds herself and demands power that once she has, seems to cave in on her and break her down. She has painful memories from her past that get her down, but not for long. Mostly, she believes in following her heart and that's probably what got her into trouble when she lost her virginity. Bridget could be, without much debate, Britney Spears' long lost cousin. Britney has a kind of happy-go lucky nature and demands a big spotlight that people gladly let her shine in. She has (obviously) had a lot of up and downs and has been put up on a pedestal and torn down many times over. She has that spirit of a really popular, then not so popular, then a really popular again entertainer. Both women have some deep internal issues but rarely ever let their insecurities show or confide in people about their problems. Bridget does have three best friends that she can tell anything and doesn’t have the paparazzi following her, but in a lot of ways she is like Britney. After she lost the big V she was a mess. Thank goodness she didn’t shave her head.  

Liars are Liars, no matter how much they lied.

I have learned that how you say something is just as important as what you’re saying. I don’t blame writers for wanting to be a little more artistic in the way that they weave their tale, but no matter how beautiful the final art project is, people won’t appreciate it for long if it falls apart. This is what tends to happen when good, average stories are stretched and pulled and rearranged to make a larger-than-life story that is meant to make the audience gasp in wonder and admiration. Books have to be 100% true in regard to the events that took place and the people that were affected by them for a book to be considered non-fiction, but the writer is an artist that is allowed to decide how they will tell a story. They can blow up a small thing because that may be important to them, or put emphasis on a certain person or accomplishment as long as it actually happened. Half-truths won’t cut it, though because reading a book with the expectation that it’s going to be true, and investing your time and attention to it only to find that it’s half  true is the same as lying to someone’s face in person. Just plain wrong. I find myself very disgusted that this person, who is the face of such a noble charity and an inspiration to many, is probably a liar and a thief. Justifying a half-true non-fiction is just plain ludicrous and immoral. We can’t keep trying to grey the area between truth and lies. David Shields is a liar, no matter what good things he has done. And it’s even worse that these people label themselves as non-fiction because that is deceiving. These are the kind of things that make me want to have clear lines between the different genres so that maybe we will be more careful before believing everything we read. Even if it is “non-fiction.”      

Not all books are created equally but...

Genre fiction isn't necessarily less worthy than literary fiction in the messages they portray, but they are less worthy in the way that they aren't as well written, deep, or have the same artistic value in the way that they tell the story. In a school's curriculum, genre fiction isn't valued as much as literary works such as Catcher in the Rye, or Romeo and Juliet are, but to say that a genre fiction is less worthy is an insult to the writer and the readers that so enjoy those kind of books.

Gallagher has a good point about Readicide, but he's not completely right. It is all about balance. We could remove some of the most painfully dull books such as Romeo and Juliet and read a similar genre fiction that could potentially teach us more than Shakespeare ever could. There’s no way that we should completely remove Shakespeare from our current curriculum, but it makes sense that we could regularly update the reading list so that more people would stay interested and read newer and more relatable books. (Whatever book it is, genre fiction or likewise, we have to get real and accept the fact that it’s not going to be all “fun n’ games.” It is school after all; it has to be at least a little academic but reading more books people like in school might encourage reading outside of school and in adult life.)

As time goes on and things change, the basic ideas books teach generally stay the same, but the kind of books that teach us those messages constantly change . . . so it would make sense to read some of those genre fictions. Plus, who’s to say what a classic is and isn't? Today's popular genre fiction book that an average English teacher might frown upon could become a great classic in 20 years.

Overall, Shakespeare isn't going to prepare someone for the real world, but it might teach them good reading and analytical skills that will help them in the real world. Genre fiction, on the other hand, might have the opposite affect. Even though you don't learn to analyze or look for symbols and writing style, the actually story might have a lot more impact on you and teach you things you can use in the real world.

Not all books are created equally—we need to pick and choose for ourselves instead of reading what someone else says is great. And there needs to be more balance between literary and genre fiction because learning isn’t just about breezing through a book, and it’s not about sticky-noting every page, it’s about finding the true value of what we’re reading with a little nudge from the teacher—not a slap in the face.

The Help

One challenge that the filmmaker might face is trying to make it seem like it took place in the 1960’s. The story is set during the civil rights movement and the Jim Crow era, and all the racial tension, not only in the town they live but everywhere in the South, might be difficult to portray.

The three scenes I think are essential for the movie are:

1. The whole “bathroom” situation. Mrs. Hilly advises her best friend Elizabeth to build a “separate but equal” bathroom for her maid Aibileen because she is convinced that black people carry dangerous diseases. This part of the book is essential in it’s representation of racism and life in the South. It makes us hate Hilly and sympathize The Help.
2. I would definitely include the scene where Skeeter meets with Minnie and Aibileen to interview them for the book she wants to write. This scene is important because it shows how little black and white people interacted and how dangerous it was.
3. Another essential scene is when Skeeter finds out that her black maid Constantine (who raised her) was fired by her mom before she came home from college. She is very upset because no one will tell her what happened or how to get in contact with her. This shows how Skeeter is different from most other white people because she isn’t prejudiced/ racist against black people and wants to help them by showing the community The Help’s point of view in her book.

In order to show just the most important events and characters in the book, I would cut out the scene where Medgar Evers is killed by the KKK. It’s just another example of racial tension in Jackson and kind of unnecessary since the author is already showing that through the black help/white family relationship. Another thing I would cut out is all of the scenes where Celia goes up to the “creepy rooms upstairs” and she discovers her drinking whiskey which isn’t really whiskey after all. This is followed with a big fight between Minny and Celia where they eventually come to terms and things go on as they did before. This is really pointless because it’s not the most important part of their relationship and actually would take too much time in the movie take away from showing how close they became. Lastly, I would take out some of the scenes of the black people in the church, because we already know that Aibileen and Minny are religious and nothing significant really happens there.

The movie adaptation of this book was really great. It has all the essential scenes, characters and plots. I almost liked it better than the book. The book is really good but I feel like I’m just reading a reference guide or something.