Excerpts from new versions of SVH

[ultimate_cin]

You can go to Amazon and read excerpts from the first chapters of the new versions of Double Love and Secrets

Comments

[carrie1982]

I just read the excerpts and I don't think I can read the entire book. It just isn't going to be the Sweet Valley I grew up with. No 1bruce1 and no Dairi Burger really bugs me. Yes, I'm a nerd but don't mess with Sweet Valley.

[dwanollah1]

I'm with you, carrie. It could be any stupid YA series.

The only thing I was happy about, upon reading the Double Love excerpt, was that they cleared up the "That was an awesome dunk shot you made in practice today, Todd!" comment of Jessica's, which was so stupid because they were getting ready for school, and even if the basketball team had had morning practices, you KNOW sweet Jess wouldn't've hauled her cookies out of bed early, Hot Boy or no Hot Boy.

[versipellis]

I'm with you, carrie. It could be any stupid YA series.

I think this is what really bugs me about it - it's so... vapid. I get easily grumpy about YA series being all American!teen!girl!leikomg anyway, but at least Sweet Valley was crazy and had its own little worldview ^^

[irinaauthor]

And it's not like Sweet Valley High wasn't vapid, but it was...I dunno...it's just that, do you think people who come fresh to this series will still be fans enough to snark on them fifteen years later?

[versipellis]

Hmph. I'm now trying to think what made the original books so... weirdly compelling to all of us. I feel like that's been lost, but I can't quite put my finger on what it was.

[cookie77]

I know that for me, it was that the characters seemed so much more grown-up than teens I knew IRL. Not to mention stable. My school had gangs, and was generally not a pleasant place. SVH was escapism for me.

[versipellis]

That's really interesting. My school was pretty much pleasant but I think for me too, there was a sense of Sweet Valley being an entire world - because the twins had so many adventures and there were so many recurring characters, I could make up my own stories and daydreams about them.

Do you feel the updates have spoilt the books, btw?

[cookie77]

Pretty much. They've made them so very different, and they've done so by making them so similar to current YA series, SV has been made redundant. The events in the SVH series (I'm not familiar with SVU or any other sub-series) happened as they did because they were published in the '80s. They should have stayed nostalgia.

[versipellis]

I got into Sweet Valley in the mid-nineties, but by making the updated versions so very 21st-century it's certainly destroyed the nostalgic feelings I have :/

[cookie77]

And to be fair, modernizing a series is not always a bad thing. I was venting about this to my husband, who doesn't know from SV but listened to me anyway, and he reminded me that I'm a huge fan of the new Battlestar Galactica. I said yeah, but the changes that were made to the new BSG were positive changes. Like acknowledging that space work is engineering work, hence dirty and grim. And allowing internal conflict instead of making the Cylons the only baddies, and so forth. But the changes made to SVH seem to be mostly negative. We snark on the old books as being shallow and full of drama!drama!drama! but they're practically Dostoevsky compared to the updates.

[versipellis]

Definitely! The new books don't seem to have been made less shallow or dramatic - they haven't fixed any of the flaws, just... given them even more flaws.

[ultimate_cin]

No 1bruce1??

No Dairi Burger??

How are they going to explain the Dairi Burger being destroyed in the earthquake? Oh wait, that's right...continuity doesn't matter, especially since I'm pretty sure there's a scene in one of the SVU books where Jess takes one of her boyfriends there.