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Since the Sex and the City movie opens today, this would be a great opportunity to talk about the book it is based on (Sex and the City by Candace Bushnell), but I haven’t actually read it. So, instead, I am going to talk about another series of books that has a (second) movie coming out soon: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares.

There are four books in the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series, and they tell the stories of the last four summers of childhood (or adolescence) of four best friends who have been together since before they were born. Truly! Their mothers met in an aerobics class for pregnant women. The first book tells the story of the summer before their junior year of high school—the first summer they each will be headed in different directions. The second book tells the story of the next summer, the third the summer after the second—you get the idea.

Without giving too much of the individual plots away—these books are written so well that you will feel as if you are reading about you and your friends’ late teen/early adulthood years. The characters are real and easy to relate to and it is refreshing to read a book for Young Adults that doesn’t make the teenagers sound old before their time. Ann Brashares doesn’t try to use “teenage slang” or any other devices to prove that she understands how teenagers talk. In fact, while you read the first book, you get the distinct impression that the characters are based on people in Brashares’ own life.

It would be easy to write these books off as “fluff”, but they aren’t. These are poignant coming of age novels that tell the story of four very real young women and how each comes into her own.