Navigating the joy and angst of teens skillfully

It all started three years ago with a pair of magical thrift-store jeans. Four suburban teenage girls -- Bridget, the soccer star; Tibby, the budding filmmaker; Carmen, the Puerto Rican hothead; and Lena, the stunning Greek beauty and artist -- were preparing to spend their first summer apart. They’d been playmates since infancy, thanks to an aerobics class their mothers shared, and had become one another’s best friends and vital support system. During their 15th year -- as told in “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,” the first book of Ann Brashares’ engaging bestselling series -- they bonded over a pair of jeans as a way of keeping in touch while away from each other.

The jeans seem average, just lying there, but when each girl pulls them on, they make her look fabulous and imbue her with a sense of strength. It’s more than good looks. Wearing those jeans, each girl can take on whatever life throws her way. The girls take turns with the jeans, making thrilling things happen while wearing them, before shipping the talismanic pants on, along with a note describing the summer’s travails and successes.

“Girls in Pants,” the third book in the series, traces the girls’ 17th summer. They’ve graduated from high school and have one final season together before heading off to college in four directions.

Lena takes art lessons that involve figure drawing. When her father learns she’s looking at naked bodies all day, he refuses to pay for her planned tenure at art college. Carmen, whose single mother remarried in the second installment, is unsure how she’ll fit in after her mother gives birth to her step-sibling. Tibby finds unexpected love with the formerly geeky boy she befriended years ago, while Bridget heads back to soccer camp in Baja to face the young man who had broken her heart.

The girls, in other words, encounter the day-to-day dilemmas facing those on the brink of adulthood. Yet the narrative does not sink into the bog of teen angst. Brashares limns the incredible pain and bewilderment of the teen years while also delineating the great joy and sense of endless possibility those years contain. The girls make mistakes, fall on their faces and lean into each other when the terrain gets rocky.

Carmen worries that after she leaves for college, she’ll be forgotten at home. She wishes she could “step out of the picture of her old life and leave a big, generous cutout waiting for her return. Giving her the chance, at least, to come back.”

When Lena secures a place in art school, she wonders why she still hungers for her father’s approval. She’ll be an adult, after all, by the time college starts. Where, she wonders, does the boundary fall between respecting your parents and following your heart?

And then there’s the problem of unrequited love. Bridget’s character is the most complex of the four girls and readers will delight watching as she matures and learns to respect the powers of sexual attraction, while remaining tormented by her old crush. “What made you feel that stomach-churning agony for one person and not another?” she asks, posing a question that many of us, long past the stage of first love, continue to wonder.

These books, though meant for teens, are a treat for anyone who wants to remember the bliss of an unknown future, when summers meant a break from life-as-usual and a chance to find yourself. Brashares doesn’t shy away from heavy subject matter, though: terminal leukemia in a friend, the death of a parent, and the specters of mental illness and alcoholism.

Readers unfamiliar with the series would be wise to start with the first volume as this book gets confusing without knowing the back story. But for those who may have lost track of the volatility of the teen years and the amazing, worth-celebrating resiliency of youth, these books will bring it all back -- along with the oft-overlooked wisdom of the young, as when Carmen reminds readers: “Whenever you did something because ‘life is too short not to,’ you could be sure life would be just long enough to punish you for it.”

Bernadette Murphy is a regular contributor to Book Review and the author of “Zen and the Art of Knitting,” a work of narrative nonfiction.