Sometimes, it’s the family that you make for yourself that means to most. It’s rare to meet someone and immediately see yourself in them, to have a friend you can tell everything to, and who begins to know you better than you know yourself. It is even rarer when that friendship spans out into a lifetime of love, and you watch each other grow up and grow old, but still share that same bond you did during those late nights at childhood sleepovers. That is when you know you have found more than a friend, you have found yourself a sister.
Finding sisterhood in friendship is something truly magical. Here we share books that celebrate female friendships turned into sisterhood that feel almost just as magical as the real thing.
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, written by Ann Brashares, is the original story of friends-turned sisters. This YA classic is the goal that all young girls wish they could follow with their best friends. The story follows four best friends, Carmen, Tibby, Lena, and Bridget. The four friends all try on a pair of jeans that Carmen found at a thrift shop. The jeans are nothing special, old and worn down, except that somehow, the jeans fit all of them perfectly. Before the girls all go their separate ways for the summer, they take a vow of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants; they all split time with the jeans between each other as a way to keep in touch.
The story of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants brings with it all of the nostalgia and hope of being young and exploring the world. It describes having friends who turn into sisters as they love each other unconditionally from all across the world, the single pair of jeans tying them together. If you are a true fan of this wholesome story, you are in luck, as the story continues in a five-part series that follows the girls into adulthood.
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells
If Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants was your childhood, then Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, by Rebecca Wells, is like its grown-up older sister. The story follows Siddalee Walker and her rocky relationship with her mother, Vivi Abbott Walker. Sidda has a hard time remembering the good times with her mother, and when they get into a fight, the Ya-Yas, some of Vivi’s best friends, take matters into their own hands with their girlhood scrapbook titled Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. The scrapbook is full of the women’s childhood memories and the beautiful story of their powerful friendship, and through it, Sidda learns the complexity of what it means to love and forgive.
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood shares a heartfelt but also funny story of womanhood. It highlights four Southern women who have been friends all their lives and know just when to be there for one another and always know how to lighten the mood with their humor. It is proof that true sisterhood follows you throughout your life, during the good times and the bad. This book, too, is part of a series, with three books total in The Ya-Ya Series, taking us back in time to the founding of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, Translated by Ann Goldstein
My Brilliant Friend is a beautiful story of a lifelong female friendship that started outside of Naples, Italy, in the 1950s. It follows Lila and Elena through girlhood into adolescence, as they learn how hard it can be to hold on to a friend when you feel yourself growing and changing. Through this story, the author, Elena Ferrante, shows not only the beauty of a lifelong female friendship but also the complexity and the conflicts that can and will occur as the years go by.
My Brilliant Friend is the must-read first book in the Neapolitan Novels series. Throughout these four books, we see Lila and Elena grow up and maintain their friendship through girlhood, womanhood, and motherhood. We watch through the eyes of Elena as the story of their lives unfolds and transforms in an absolutely stunning series.
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
The Joy Luck Club follows a different kind of sisterhood, not one formed from lifelong friendship and growing up together, but instead, one formed out of a need for community and understanding. Set in San Francisco in 1949, four mothers, all recent immigrants from China, form the Joy Luck Club, where they play weekly games of mahjong and tell the stories of their past lives in China while sharing their hopes for their four daughters’ futures. Each woman has her own story to tell and her own way of telling it, and as each story unravels, the women only become more closely knit.
It is a story of mother-daughter relationships as much as it is of this sisterhood of mothers, as they each navigate sharing the things they would rather keep to themselves, and daughters who do not want to listen to their stories of the past in their modern new American lives.
Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah
In Firefly Lane, Kristin Hannah proves that lifelong friendships can form in even the most unlikely of circumstances. The story starts when Kate and Tully are in eighth grade, when being “cool” feels like the most important thing of all. Tully is cool, and Kate isn’t, but still, somehow, they become best friends. The two grow up alongside one another and see each other through the next three decades of their lives. The women learn that sisterhood, even sisterhood formed from friendship, is not always pretty. Such a close bond will always bring fights, but one big betrayal threatens the friendship they have fostered for thirty years.
Firefly Lane is a coming-of-age story that shows the less glorified version of best friendship. Having a best friend that spans decades can be a brutal thing. When the person who knows you best truly knows you, enough to hurt you, to heal you, and to give you the hardest truths you never wanted to hear.
Summer Sisters by Judy Blume
In Summer Sisters by Judy Blume, Victoria becomes Caitlin Somer’s summer sister when she invites her on her family vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, a privileged world entirely different from Vix’s own. It is one of those sparkling summer friendships that feel magical and golden in youth. Now, years later, Vix was invited to the island once again to be Caitlin’s maid of honor. Vix has to find out after all these years, if Caitlin truly is her summer sister, or if that last summer she spent with her ruined what they had.
Judy Blume, known for her books for a younger audience, writes this adult novel with the same nostalgic charm. She paints a beautiful picture of the perfect summer that, like Vix and Caitlin, you can’t help but wish will be restored upon Vix’s return.
Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson
Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson sheds a golden light on a childhood basked in shadow. When August runs into a friend from childhood, she remembers her beautiful childhood friendships, the girls to whom she told everything to and with whom she would roam through the neighborhood like it was theirs. To her and her young best friends, Brooklyn was theirs, and it was a place filled with hope. Until the real world hit the girls hard, and Brooklyn became a place with dangerous men, lost mothers, and haunted nights. That’s when everything changed for them.
Another Brooklyn tells a coming-of-age story that shakes the sister-like bond of four girls as their childhood gives way to adulthood, and they learn that the sisterhood they thought would last forever may have been as fleeting as their youth.
Sisterhood, even that formed from friendship, has its ups and downs, but where would we be without it? We all need that friend whom we couldn’t live without. We hope you will share these books with your best friend and appreciate them a little more.
Read more about the importance of female friendship here.
Find these books and more on our Thought-Provoking Novels About Womanhood bookshelf on Bookshop.org.
