Another Book Review
This is a review found in the Washington Times Style section. I first came across it on tumblr. Figured I would share with y'all!
There was a time - and if you did not live through this time, I cannot explain it to you, because it probably means you never longed to be a Unicorn or write for the Oracle - when the personality of every high school girl could be explained by the following shorthand: Jessica. Or Elizabeth.
The Wakefield twins were the original Gossip Girls, the twinemies who ruled Sweet Valley High over the course of more than 143 books plus a mess of spinoff series and innumerable switcheroo high jinks that were mostly plotted by bad twin Jessica and nixed by good twin Elizabeth. There was a board game. The object was to get ready for your date, and you hoped it wasn’t with Winston.
Ladies, ready your scrunchies. After 10 years, Jessica and Elizabeth are back in “Sweet Valley Confidential.” The new novel, released Tuesday, propels them into adulthood. But why? Another beloved series, “The Baby-sitters Club,” got a reboot last year, so this journey into early-’90s girlhood is starting to feel too done. Are we all just looking for a chance to be retronauts, touring that weird outer space of our junior high years? (Screenwriter Diablo Cody says yes: She’s been tied to a “Sweet Valley” film for ages.) Are we unable to grow up? Stuck in a nostalgic belief that an update of whatever came out in 1993 is more worthy than anything created now?
Can we all agree that Lila Fowler was a troll? [OP: Hater bitch just jealous she isn't as fabu as Lila Mother Fucking Fowler.]
“Sweet Valley Confidential,” written by the original series creator, Francine Pascal, picks up seven years after we left the twins studying at Sweet Valley University. At 27, Elizabeth is living in a prewar Manhattan apartment and writing about off-Broadway shows for a free weekly newspaper. In the real world, this job would pay for one paw of her claw-foot tub, but people with aqua eyes that “dance in the light like shards of precious stones” also have the ability to procure good housing.
Jessica still lives in California, marketing cosmetics and planning her wedding to - spoiler alert: It’s impossible to delve into Sweet Valium-land without divulging this crucial plot point - Todd Wilkins. As in, Elizabeth’s Todd, her loyal varsity boyfriend who was smart enough to realize that when two sisters are identically gorgeous, you might as well date the one who is not a scheming airhead.
But no. In “Confidential,” Todd’s with Jessica, and the rest of the book is a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards explaining exactly how that happened. Other “Sweet Valley” residents parade in and out, marrying and divorcing each other, dying in accidents, realizing they are gay, realizing they are gay and in love with their sister’s first boyfriends, and hanging out at the country club. The Unicorns have stopped wearing purple, which is tragic, but other things have remained the same. Bruce Patman is here, and Caroline Pearce, and mild Enid Rollins, who has become an ultra-conservative alcoholic gynecologist having an affair with a shoe salesman.
Continuity was never the strong point of the series, but the new “Sweet Valley” reads less like a sequel and more like fan fiction - and not the meticulous, in-canon kind that obeys the laws of the Sweet Valleyverse, either. Reading “Confidential” is like stumbling onto the message boards populated by the deluded people who insist that Harry Potter is in love with Prof. Snape. All this could have been fun and entertaining if written by amateurs, but really, Francine, you should have known better. “She cried after every orgasm” is not a sentence that anyone wants to read about Elizabeth Wakefield.
Who, exactly, is this book written for? Not a new generation of tweens, for whom 27 is ancient and who already have a slew of “Pretty Little Liars” and “American Teenagers” to choose from. But it doesn’t hit the sweet spot for grown-up original fans, either. At the very least, the hallmark of a good series reboot is that it should have a transporting quality - it should remind you why you read the books to begin with.
In “Confidential,” even the things that remain the same no longer resonate. The twins’ absurd beauty, for example, was fun to read about at 12, when it still seemed achievable. (Once the Proactiv kicks in, I will blossom!) But when you’re 27, you just wish Liz or Jess would have a bad hair day or stress-eat a pint of gelato.
At its best, the “Sweet Valley” series was a way for young readers to work through anxieties about high school: How to deal with cliques. How to deal with siblings. How to deal with siblings who reject you from their cliques but love you deep down.
“Confidential” isn’t a book for high schoolers. It’s not a book for women who want to remember the girls they were in high school. It’s not even a meta-exploration of a parody of a series once written for high schoolers but now slyly winking at the grown-ups they have become. And as much as you long to see what your favorite youthful literary characters became when they grew up, that longing dissipates quickly when you learn the answer is “idiots.”
If you’re really after a piece of your youth, just reread the originals. They’re going on eBay for 99 cents a pop.