The Last Summer Before Everything Changes

The girls have graduated from high school. In a few months, they'll scatter - Bridget to Brown, Lena to the Rhode Island School of Design, Tibby to NYU for filmmaking, Carmen to Williams College. This is the last summer they'll spend in Bethesda together, the last time their daily lives will overlap the way they have since their mothers met in that prenatal aerobics class eighteen years ago. Everyone knows it. Nobody wants to say it. And Girls in Pants - the third book in Ann Brashares's Sisterhood series - gets its emotional power from the constant, low-hum awareness that every shared moment is one of a dwindling supply.

It's also the book where the stakes get genuinely heavy. A child nearly dies. A mother goes into premature labor. A father tries to control his daughter's future. A relationship that's been building for three books finally begins. Brashares handles all of it with the empathy and specificity that have defined the series, though the accumulation of dramatic events does occasionally strain the structure - this is a lot of crisis for one summer, even by Sisterhood standards.

Tibby and Katherine's Fall

Tibby's storyline is the book's emotional anchor and its most devastating sequence. Her younger sister Katherine - about three years old - falls from Tibby's bedroom window while Tibby is supposed to be watching her. Tibby had left the window open, forgetting that Katherine had been reaching for an apple on the tree outside. Katherine survives, but she's seriously injured, and Tibby spirals into a guilt so consuming that it reshapes every other relationship in her life.

The timing is cruel. Earlier that summer, Brian - loyal, patient Brian, who has been Tibby's closest friend since the first book - confessed his feelings and kissed her at a senior party. They were on the verge of becoming something more. After Katherine's accident, Tibby pushes Brian away completely, convinced that the accident happened because she was distracted by her feelings for him, that taking emotional risks leads to people getting hurt. It's the kind of irrational but psychologically precise guilt that Brashares writes better than almost anyone in YA - the belief that happiness is dangerous because the universe punishes you for wanting it.

The resolution comes through an unlikely catalyst. When Carmen's mother Christina goes into premature labor and the other girls can't get there fast enough, Tibby ends up as the emergency labor coach - a terrified seventeen-year-old talking a woman through contractions and helping bring a new life into the world. The experience doesn't erase her guilt about Katherine, but it breaks through the paralysis. If she can be present for something this big and this scary, she can be present for Brian too. They begin a real relationship by the book's end, and Tibby commits to NYU knowing that she's capable of more bravery than she's been giving herself credit for.

Carmen, the Baby, and Letting Go

Carmen's arc this summer revolves around her mother Christina's pregnancy - Christina and David are expecting a baby, and Carmen, who has spent two books processing her father's new family, now has to process the fact that her mother is building a new family too. She considers giving up Williams College to stay local, telling herself it's practical but really wanting to hold on to a version of her life where she's still the center of her mother's world.

Carmen spends much of the summer volunteering at the hospital alongside Lena's grandmother Valia, and there she meets Win Sawyer, a college student and hospital volunteer whose steady kindness draws her out of her defensive posture. Carmen's fear with Win is specific and relatable - she worries that he's only seeing "Good Carmen," the selfless, caring version of herself she performs at the hospital, and that he won't accept the jealous, territorial, sometimes selfish person she knows herself to be. It's a more mature version of the insecurity that's driven her across all three books: the fear that the real you isn't lovable enough to keep people from leaving.

When Christina goes into premature labor - four weeks early, with David out of town - Carmen steps up, helping arrange care and being present for the birth of a baby boy named Ryan. The moment she holds her new brother, the threat she'd been feeling dissolves. Ryan isn't replacing her. He's adding to a family that has room for both of them. She decides to go to Williams after all, kisses Win, and leaves the hospital understanding something that took her three summers to learn: other people's happiness doesn't diminish yours.

Bridget and Eric, Round Two

Bridget's storyline brings her back to what she does best - soccer - but in a different capacity. She takes a coaching position at a soccer camp in Pennsylvania, and discovers that Eric Richman, the coach she pursued so recklessly in the first book, is also coaching there. He has a girlfriend now. Bridget tells herself she'll keep things platonic this time, determined not to repeat the pattern of throwing herself at intensity to avoid feeling what's underneath.

The restraint doesn't last. The connection between them is still there, and Brashares handles the slow rebuild with more care than the first book's headlong rush. When Bridget gets sick at camp, Eric takes care of her, and the intimacy of that vulnerability - being seen when you're weak rather than when you're performing strength - shifts the dynamic between them. Eric leaves camp temporarily, goes to New York, and breaks up with his girlfriend. He returns and tells Bridget he believes they were always meant to be together. They become a couple, and Bridget heads to Brown with a relationship that's been earned through two books of growth rather than one summer of recklessness.

Bridget's mother's suicide continues to shadow her arc, though it's less central here than in the second book. The healing that began in Alabama with Greta hasn't completed, and Brashares is honest about the fact that it never will - grief from a parent's suicide isn't something you finish processing. But Bridget is steadier now, less inclined to outrun her feelings, and the Eric relationship reflects that steadiness. She's not chasing someone this time. She's choosing someone, which is a different and harder thing.

Lena, Art, and the Fight for Her Future

Lena's storyline is the book's quietest but in some ways its most satisfying, because it gives her something to fight for that isn't a boy. Lena wants to attend RISD - the Rhode Island School of Design - and pursue art seriously. Her father witnesses her drawing a nude model in her figure drawing class and forbids it, refusing to pay for art school and insisting she pursue something practical. It's a conflict rooted in generational and cultural expectations about what constitutes a real career, and Brashares writes Lena's father as protective rather than villainous - he genuinely believes he's saving his daughter from a precarious future.

Lena's art instructor, Annik Marchand, encourages her to apply for a scholarship. Lena builds a portfolio by drawing the people around her - her family members, Carmen's stepbrother Paul Rodman (who visits and poses for her), and her grandmother Valia, who has moved in with the family after her grandfather's death and is cranky, homesick, and difficult. The act of drawing Valia becomes its own form of understanding - Lena sees her grandmother more clearly through the attention that art requires than she ever did through casual proximity. She wins the scholarship, and her father ultimately gives his permission for RISD. Of the four girls, Lena is the only one who doesn't end the book in a romantic relationship, which feels right - her arc this summer is about claiming her own direction, not about love.

The Third Summer and What It Costs

The book's strength is the ticking clock. Every scene carries the weight of impending separation, and Brashares doesn't have to underline it - the awareness that this is ending suffuses every interaction with a poignancy that earlier books didn't have. The girls' friendship isn't being tested by the summer's crises so much as it's being tested by the calendar. They've always been able to reunite at the end of August. After this summer, that's no longer guaranteed.

The book's weakness is the opposite side of that strength: the sheer volume of dramatic events can feel piled on. Katherine's fall, Christina's premature labor, Tibby becoming an emergency labor coach, Lena's father's ultimatum, Bridget and Eric's reunion - any two of these would sustain a summer novel. All of them together occasionally tip toward melodrama, and Publishers Weekly noted that Tibby's last-minute labor coaching particularly strains credibility. The love interests - Win, Brian, Eric - also remain somewhat siloed from each other and from the sisterhood's collective life, which means the romantic subplots don't enrich the friendship dynamic as much as they could.

Brashares also has a tendency, more visible here than in earlier books, to spell out the lessons each girl learns rather than trusting the reader to extract them from the narrative. The thematic connections between the storylines - letting go, accepting change, choosing courage over safety - are clear enough without being stated directly, and the moments where Brashares articulates them explicitly can feel like the book doesn't trust its own emotional intelligence.

But the core of the series - four girls who love each other through the worst summers of their lives - is as powerful here as it's ever been. The final scene, with the sisterhood gathering before they scatter to their separate colleges, carries the specific grief of any real goodbye: the knowledge that you'll see each other again but never quite like this, never with this particular ease, never as the same people you are right now. It's the truest thing in the book, and it needs no magic pants to make it work.

Rating: 4.0/5 ⭐

Perfect for: Fans of the series, anyone facing the anxiety of major life transitions, readers who appreciate YA that takes its characters' emotional lives seriously.

Skip if: The accumulation of dramatic crises feels like too much for one summer, or you're looking for lighter YA fare.