The Harder Second Summer

The first summer was about discovering that your best friends can survive being apart. The second summer - the one that starts when you're sixteen turning seventeen and everything from last year's growth feels like it's sliding backward - is about discovering that surviving apart doesn't mean you've figured out how to be together. The Second Summer of the Sisterhood picks up a year after the events of the first book, and Brashares makes a smart choice: instead of repeating the formula with new problems, she deepens the existing ones. Carmen's family fractures haven't healed. Tibby's armor is back up. Bridget's grief hasn't gone anywhere. Lena's heart is still guarded. The pants circulate again, but the magic this time isn't about holding the sisterhood together. It's about whether the sisterhood can handle what each girl is becoming.

This is the second of five books in the series - followed by Girls in Pants, Forever in Blue, and Sisterhood Everlasting - and it functions as a true middle chapter, willing to make things worse before they get better and honest about the fact that growth isn't linear. The girls who found themselves last summer now have to figure out what to do with what they found.

Carmen and the Mother's Boyfriend

Carmen's storyline is the one that most directly mirrors her arc from the first book, and that repetition is both the point and the limitation. Last summer, she dealt with her father starting a new family in South Carolina. This summer, the disruption comes from the other direction: her mother Christina begins dating David, a coworker, and Carmen reacts with the same territorial fury she felt toward Lydia - except this time she can't blame an absent parent for moving on. This time the parent is right here, in the same house, choosing to let someone new in while Carmen is still processing what it means that her father already did.

Carmen sabotages the relationship. She's manipulative about it in ways that are painful to watch because Brashares writes them with enough psychological specificity that you understand exactly why Carmen is doing what she's doing even as you wish she'd stop. Christina and David break up. Christina becomes depressed. Carmen is forced to confront the fact that her mother's happiness isn't a threat to her own - that two people can be loved simultaneously, that a new partner doesn't erase a daughter. She helps reunite them. Meanwhile, her stepsister Krista runs away from Charleston to Bethesda after fighting with her stepmother, and Carmen finds herself in the unfamiliar position of being the stable one, the person someone else runs to. She also develops an interest in a classmate named Porter, though the romantic thread stays secondary to the family dynamics.

The criticism that Carmen's arc is a do-over from Book 1 is fair - she's dealing with a parent's new partner again, reacting with jealousy and sabotage again, learning the same lesson about not centering herself in other people's happiness. But Brashares seems aware of the repetition. The point is that Carmen didn't fully learn this lesson the first time, that emotional growth happens in circles rather than straight lines, and that the version of this conflict involving your mother hits differently than the version involving your father.

Tibby at Film School

Tibby's storyline takes her to a summer film course at a college campus in Virginia, and it's structured around the question of what happens to a person's defenses when the loss that cracked them open starts to scar over. Last summer, Bailey's death broke through Tibby's cynicism. This summer, the cynicism is rebuilding. Tibby falls in with Alex and Maura, two classmates from New York who are shallow, cutting, and cool in exactly the way that makes Tibby feel sophisticated for hanging out with them. When Brian - the loyal, earnest friend she's been close to since the first book - visits her at the program, she treats him badly, embarrassed by his uncoolness in front of her new crowd.

The centerpiece of her arc is the film she makes. For a class assignment, she creates a documentary about her mother that's deliberately cruel - using real footage to portray her as ridiculous and pathetic. It's a mean film, and Tibby knows it's mean, and she makes it anyway because the new friends reward meanness and because the alternative - making something honest, something that requires vulnerability - is too frightening after what vulnerability cost her with Bailey. The reckoning comes when she sees the film for what it is: not edgy filmmaking but a failure of courage. She dumps Alex and Maura, reconciles with Brian and her mother, and for her final project, makes a heartfelt tribute film about Bailey.

It's a satisfying arc, though it requires Tibby to be genuinely unlikeable for a significant stretch of the book. Some readers find this frustrating; others recognize it as realistic. Teenagers who've been hurt do exactly what Tibby does - they rebuild the walls and test whether the people who love them will still be there after being pushed away. Brian is still there. That matters.

Bridget in Alabama

Bridget's storyline is the book's strongest, and it's the one that most directly continues the emotional thread left unresolved in the first novel. Instead of running toward something (soccer camp, Eric), she's finally running toward the thing she's been avoiding: her mother's suicide. Bridget discovers letters from her estranged maternal grandmother, Greta Randolph, and travels to Alabama without telling anyone. She shows up at Greta's door using the alias "Gilda," pretending to be a hired helper, and begins working around the house.

The disguise is transparent - Greta later reveals she knew who Bridget was from the moment she arrived - but it gives Bridget the emotional buffer she needs to approach her mother's story sideways rather than head-on. She clears out the attic, finding her mother's mementos. She coaches a local kids' soccer team, rediscovering her love of the game without the reckless intensity that defined her at camp. She befriends Billy Kline, a childhood acquaintance. And gradually, through conversations with Greta and through the physical evidence of her mother's life stored in boxes and photographs, Bridget pieces together what happened - her mother Marlene's diagnosis of mental illness in college, her time in an institution, the depression that deepened after her children were born, and the suicide that Bridget remembers finding but has never been able to talk about.

Brashares handles this material with more care than almost anything else in the series. Bridget's grief doesn't resolve into acceptance or closure. It opens into understanding - a recognition that her mother was sick, that the sickness wasn't Bridget's fault, and that loving someone who was mentally ill doesn't mean you're destined to follow the same path. When Bridget finally reveals her identity to Greta, the scene is quiet and earned, and the grandmother-granddaughter bond that forms is one of the book's most affecting relationships.

Lena and the Heartbreak That Comes for Her

Lena's storyline this summer is the cruelest. She broke up with Kostos between books - the long distance, the constant missing him, the impossibility of a relationship conducted across an ocean - and has been trying to move on. Then Kostos arrives in America for a summer internship, and everything Lena had carefully sealed away breaks open again. They reunite. The connection is still there. It feels like a second chance.

Then Kostos abruptly returns to Greece. Lena's grandfather has a stroke and dies, and she travels to Santorini for the funeral. There, she discovers that Kostos has married another woman - a woman he got pregnant after his breakup with Lena. He tells Lena he still loves her, but he's doing what he considers the honorable thing. It's devastating, and Brashares doesn't soften it with the promise that things will work out eventually. Lena is heartbroken, and the consolation she receives - from her mother, who shares the story of her own first love, a relationship that ended before she met Lena's father - is tender without being redemptive. It doesn't fix anything. It just says: this happened to me too, and I survived it, and so will you.

At the novel's end, there's a quiet suggestion that Lena might connect with Paul - Carmen's stepbrother from the first book - but it arrives with a speed that some readers find jarring after the devastation of the Kostos storyline.

Where the Second Summer Lands

The book's structure replicates the first novel - four parallel storylines connected by the traveling pants - and that repetition is both its comfort and its ceiling. The formula works. The pants circulate. The girls write on the legs. The letters and emails between them provide connective tissue. But some of the individual arcs feel like variations on themes the first book already explored. Carmen is jealous of a parent's new partner again. Lena is navigating Kostos again. The storylines that break new ground - Tibby's reckoning with cruelty and Bridget's confrontation with her mother's death - are the ones that elevate the book. The ones that retread are the ones that keep it at four stars rather than higher.

The book has more peripheral characters to track than the first - David, Porter, Alex, Maura, Billy, Greta, Paul, Krista - and not all of them are developed enough to justify their presence. The pacing is occasionally uneven, with Bridget's Alabama chapters carrying more emotional weight than the surrounding storylines. But Brashares's fundamental gift - writing teenage girls with enough specificity and empathy that they feel like real people rather than types - remains intact, and the moments where the book works (Bailey's tribute film, Greta's attic, Kostos's marriage reveal) are as strong as anything in the series.

Rating: 4.0/5 ⭐

Perfect for: Fans of the first book who want to see these characters deepen, readers who appreciate honest portrayals of grief, jealousy, and the non-linear nature of growing up.

Skip if: Repeated thematic territory from Book 1 frustrates you, or you need each girl's storyline to break entirely new ground.