THE SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS: FREE CHAPTER SUMMARY / ANALYSIS


CHAPTER SUMMARIES AND NOTES

Note: We have inserted chapter numbers into this study guide for ease of use. They do not correspond to the actual text, which uses quotations as the title of each chapter.

PROLOGUE


“Not All Who Wander Are Lost.” - J. R. R. Tolkien

Summary

The prologue is a narrative by Carmen, the Puerto Rican girl who first found the blue jeans in a thrift shop. She tells the reader all about the pants from the perspective of their magic. They came to the girls through what Carmen calls a painful life transition and that is what becomes The Way of the Pants. Carmen only bought them, because she was tagging along with her friend Lena and her mother, and Mrs. Kaligaris hated second hand shops. They were only $3.49 including tax, and she didn’t even try them on. She really wasn’t serious about owning them, because “her butt had specific requirements for pants.” When she got home, she put the pants in the back of her closet and forgot about them.

On the afternoon before the girls were all going their separate ways for the summer, the pants came out again. Carmen was going to South Carolina to hang out with her dad; Lena was spending two months in Greece with her grandparents; Bridget was flying off to soccer camp in Baja, California; and Tibby was staying home. This would be the first summer this very close group of friends would be apart, and it seemed to give them all a shaky, strange feeling. Their lives had been marked by the summers they had spent together, when their lives joined completely. They had started out together even before they were born. Their mothers had met in a class of aerobics for pregnant women, and the four girls were born within a few weeks of each other at the end of the summer. The mothers were called the September Group, and they began hanging out after class. This lasted until the girls were about three when the mothers began to drift apart, and the friendship began to be about their daughters rather than them. So the girls became the Septembers, and even though they were all different types, they became committed to each other.

Why? Because they loved each other, and they were nice to each other, and that was rare. Carmen’s mother told her it wouldn’t stay that way, but the girls believed it would. The pants became their talisman upon which they made a promise to always stick together, and when they went out into the world with all its challenges, they promised to find a way to make it work.

Notes

The purpose of the Prologue is to introduce the reader to the Septembers - four young girls who have been friends since they were in their mother’s wombs and who now must face their first summer apart. It prepares the reader for their character types and their commitment to each other. It sets up the “magic” of the traveling pants and how each of them wears them and learns something very valuable about what Carmen calls “painful life transitions.”

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