Rule number one: "You must never wash the pants." Rule number two: "You must never double cuff the pants. It's tacky." Thus begin the ten commandments of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, a young-adult novel penned by first-time novelist Ann Brashares and published in 2001. Rule number ten: "Remember: Pants = Love. Love your pals. Love yourself." If there is a message in this "feel-good novel with substance," as a critic for Kirkus Reviews called the book, it is found in that final rule.

Long-time editor Brashares posits a new kind of sisterhood in her debut bestseller, introducing four teenage girls who agree to send a pair of secondhand jeans from friend to friend the first summer they are to be separated. These traveling pants thus take on a metaphoric quality, uniting the best friends across the thousands of miles separating them.

Coming of Age in "Plain Jane" Maryland...