Many girls grew up with Tibby, Carmen, Lena and Bridget – the four girls who make up “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,” a series of books by author Ann Brashares.

Readers followed the girls fall in love for the first time, lose parents to suicide and friends to cancer, and go their separate ways when the time came to go off to college. Throughout the books, the girls found a link to each other via the “traveling pants,” a pair of jeans that fits each of their bodies perfectly despite their different sizes and shapes.

To the girls, the pants are magical.

It has been four years since the release of the final book in the “Sisterhood” series and the loss of the traveling pants in Oia, a small community near Santorini, Greece. Brashares’ newest book, “Sisterhood Everlasting,” which was published in June, is not part of the actual “Traveling Pants” series but rather a continuation of the girls’ stories as they traverse the trials of adulthood.

Fast forward from the end of the girls’ first year of college to 10 years later. Carmen is now a semi-successful actress, having built upon her theater experience established in the previous novels. Lena has graduated from Rhode Island School of Design and is now painting for a living and casually dating guys to pass the time. Bridget has moved in with Eric, the man to whom she lost her virginity in the first book, and they are living a slightly transient and nomadic lifestyle in San Francisco. Tibby is living with Brian, the man she has struggled to maintain a relationship with during all of the novels, somewhere in Australia.

The girls are older, more tired and, if possible, more uncertain of their futures than they were when they were 16.

Brashares’ sparkling relationships among four best friends have deteriorated. After so much time without talking and without the pants, a few expect only a yearly phone call – if that. As a dedicated and loyal follower of the series, it was difficult at first to understand why the author would do this with arguably her most famous fictional characters, but then understanding came.

The lack of interaction between the girls and the state of their relationships brings a distinctly young-adult series into a fully adult novel. Gone is the hesitance and anticipation of late adolescence, and in its place is a book filled with adults and adult problems. What starts out as a mildly depressing foray into the future of four women readers grew up with takes a turn into mystery and macabre when one of the girls, Tibby, is found dead in Greece.

Even with tears flowing and damp hands, the reading must continue. Brashares artfully crafts the rest of the girls’ lives, post-Tibby. The threads which once linked the girls in an indelible bond are once again woven together as Carmen remembers her past and her history, Bridget reconciles her not-necessarily-wanted pregnancy and her relationship with a man who wants permanence when she does not, and Lena embarks on an epic letter-writing campaign with the man who broke her heart years before.

Most noticeable in Brashares’ new take on the sisterhood is the girls have not changed at all. These are still the same girls readers fell in love with since the first book was published 10 years ago. Followers of the series will still feel the same heart-wrenching emotions and enjoy the same dialogue and story-interplay between all the characters.

It seems 10 years is really no time at all in the land of the “Traveling Pants.”

Alexandra Poggione can be reached at [email protected].