SVT Super Edition #4: The Unicorns Go Hawaiian
Okay, guys. This is it. I don't want to hype it up too much, but this is, quite possibly, the best SVT book of all time. Basically, the only characters who feature in it are the only Unicorns worth bothering with - Jessica, Lila, Janet, Mandy, Ellen, and Mary. (Okay, granted that no one cares about Mary, but whatever.) They go to Hawaii. They eat a lot of pineapple. They grapple with ancient curses. The book cover itself is silver.
It is ridiculous. It is FABULOUS. It is The Unicorns Go Hawaiian. Cha-cha-cha!
(Is it mean of me to note that none of the Unicorns look very pretty on this cover? I also can't believe that Jessica rather than Janet - whom I'm assuming is the drunk girl with the ugly fringe at the top - is in the centre of this picture, but I suppose the series is called Sweet Valley Twins. My guess at who the characters framing Jess are, from left to right: Lila, Mary, Janet, Mandy, Ellen.)
Incidentally, I came across the following review on Amazon:
Mindless, stupid, 21 Jul 1997
Reviewer: A reader
Mindless, stupid, unsophisticated and sexist junk featuring the "oh so californian sweetharts" on the world's biggest quest: to find a dress for the school prom. Quite a disgrace to young adult books. Pure nonsense. What a joke.
I feel disproportionately offended by this review. Shut up, A reader, if that is in fact your real name! As there is not so much as a mention of a prom dress in The Unicorns Go Hawaiian, I put it to you that you did not even READ the book and that you are making things up! Oh, yes. I WENT THERE. Moreover, if you had read it, you would have known that it is BRILLIANT. Moreover also, YOUR MOM.
Anyway, the book. Jess is a terrible cook, but she decides to enter a pineapple-themed cooking competition in a magazine as a joke. Spurred on by Mandy Miller, she makes a pineapple potato salad for the Pineapple People, and throws in anchovies, chocolate chips, peppermint extract, and green food colouring, calling it "Poisonous Potato Salad". That sounds so gross but also so much fun. I wish I was twelve again.
Two months later, everyone's forgotten about the cooking competition. While shopping for presents at the mall, Liz and Jess discuss the family's plans to visit their grandparents at a ski lodge after Christmas. Jess isn't looking forward to skiing because she's afraid of getting a runny nose. Then Amy shows up. Amy is ugly in this series and doesn't care about dating tennis players, so Jess makes a quick escape over to where the Unicorns are hanging out by the frozen yoghurt counter. Jess says:
"Where do you guys want to go shopping first?"
Lila shrugged. "I don't really care. I was going to get a new outfit for Christmas dinner, but..."
"But what?" Jessica pressed.
"But now that I know Bambi's going to be there, I don't really care what I wear! Maybe I'll just wear my sweatpants and a smelly old T-shirt."
"Who's Bambi?" Jessica asked.
"You know, the baby deer," Ellen answered. "Thumper's friend."
Seriously, I'm amazed that Ellen is capable of getting dressed in the morning without putting her clothes on back-to-front.
Bambi is in fact George Fowler's new girlfriend - an actress. Lila hates her because "she's a bimbo". Says the Unicorn. Lila's dad has been spending all his time with her, and considering that Lila is fairly starved for attention anyway, she's sick of Bambi taking up even more of his time. I'm sort of on both sides here. On the one hand, we all know that Lila's dad sucks, and he clearly doesn't give a shit about her concerns in this book. On the other hand, Lila is pretty obnoxious to Bambi who is nothing but nice to her. It's a toss-up!
At school, Lila rushes in with big news, a magazine in hand. Jess has won the cooking competition! Her first prize? Jess rather sweetly suggests, "A zillion cans of pineapple?" But no, it's much better than that! It's a trip to Hawaii for three!
Thrilled to be given an opportunity to skip the ski trip, Jess invites Mandy and Mary Wallace to go with her, thus hurting Lila's feelings because as Jess' best friend and the person responsible for alerting Jess to the competition results, Lila feels as though she should have been invited. On this issue I'm on Lila's side - true, Lila's been on lots of holidays before, but other than the reasons already mentioned, Jess knows that Lila hasn't been feeling her best lately because of Bambi. Lila is like, "I don't think that my father, the inventor of Toaster-Strudel, will be too pleased to hear about this."
But when Jess gets home that night, her parents have some terrible news. They're not letting her go without a chaperone! I don't blame Jess for being surprised by this decision - I'm pretty alarmed myself whenever Ned and Alice act responsibly. There's a chapter break immediately after this revelation to heighten the drama, but given that the front cover of the book shows smiley girls dressed in swimsuits and leis, I'm not too concerned.
An excited Lila phones to tell Jess that she's convinced her father to send Janet Howell, Ellen Riteman, and herself to Hawaii along with the others, with George Fowler acting as chaperone, and Jess suddenly sees the solution to her problem. She'll get Ned to phone George Fowler and arrange for him to chaperone herself, Mandy and Mary as well! Lila's dad is in the Fowlers' sauna but Lila reassures Jess that he'll pick up as there's a phone in every room in her mansion. Continuity!
Ned and Alice, in a valiant attempt to continue their "responsible parent" streak, express some concern over Lila's dad's capabilities as a supervisor of six pubescent girls, but eventually they just say, "Fuck it," and let Jess go. You know, sometimes all you can do is sit back and laugh at their half-assed attempts at parenting. Jess excitedly begins to pack, although she considers just stuffing a swimsuit in her bag and spending every moment of her vacation on the beach. Mmmm, melanoma.
And at last the six girls, plus George Fowler and Bambi, are off! It's kind of harsh that the other, unloved Unicorns, like Tamara and Kimberley, are stuck at home with their bulimia and self-loathing while these six go to Hawaii. If I were them, I'd hate to be sitting at the Unicorner come the first day of spring semester. There's this whole conversation centred around the fact that Lila, Janet, and Mandy are the only girls who have ever set foot on a plane before, and I remember being obnoxiously smug reading this as an nine-year-old kid because I'd flown to lots of places. Ellen sees the stewardess and dorks out over her uniform. I kind of love Ellen. What happened to her after The Unicorn Club series ended? Also, why hasn't anyone recapped any of those books? I want answers, damnit!
When they arrive in Hawaii, they divide up the rooms. Interestingly - considering that their relationship is supposed to be so serious - Bambi isn't sharing a room with Lila's dad. Are they not having the sex? Or is it a pretence for Lila's benefit? Because I have to say, my confidence in George Fowler is so low that I can only think of one reason why he'd be dating a blonde actress. Anyway, Lila's dad comes in and announces his intention to lay down some ground rules, in order to be a responsible chaperone. George Fowler's Rules For Girls:
Mr. Fowler sat down on the edge of one of the beds while the group watched him expectantly. His brow was furrowed and he seemed to be concentrating very hard. Suddenly his eyes lit up. "To start with, I don't want you spending your money on inferior quality merchandise," he instructed forcefully. "Shop carefully, and avoid tacky souvenir peddlers." He crossed his arms over his chest, apparently satisfied.
For a moment, nobody spoke. "Is - is that it?" Mandy finally ventured.
"Trust me, it's good advice," Mr. Fowler said. He stood abruptly.
Indeed. Fortunately, Bambi offers to pitch in with childcare. Then there's half a chapter of pretty good Lila POV, Lila fans! She lies on the beach with her towel and sunglasses and cynically reflects on how naïve Jess is. All she needs is a martini in hand to complete the picture. Fun fact: this book was the first place where young daniellafromage heard the word "naïve"!
The characters then split up for much of the rest of the book.
• Janet meets cute boy Kenji, who convinces her that she's a reincarnation of a Hawaiian princess. She looks exactly like her, even down to the mole on the side of her lip. If she ever tries to leave Hawaii, Kenji tells her, then Pele - the volcano goddess, not the footballer - will erupt. When Janet tries to appease Pele by bribing her with a curling iron and a Johnny Buck cassette, Kenji tells her that even though she just considered about going back to Sweet Valley, she's cursed.
• While sunbathing on the beach, Lila comes across a beautiful expensive-looking red ring which she eagerly slips on. Unfortunately, she can't get it off again, even when she recruits the help of a surfer she meets on the beach (who, hilariously, suggests that her finger is "too fat". Ha ha! Ouch!). Lila runs into Kenji, who tells her that the ring was buried with King Kamehameha, and because she stole it, she's cursed.
• Jessica becomes convinced that she isn't the real competition winner after everyone at the Pineapple People headquarters calls her "Jessica Wakely", but she keeps quiet because she's afraid that she'll be sent home. Kenji shows up again and tells her that because she didn't own up to identity theft, she's cursed.
• Mandy and Mary run about like headless chickens as they overhear a few conversations and become convinced that George Fowler and Bambi are getting married. Oh, and Mary learns to surf. I wish they'd dropped Mary from this book and replaced her with Bruce Patman. I said in my last recap that I'm no fan of Bruce, but at least his storylines are rarely boring. Man, even freaking Todd would be a better choice. (He could go whale-watching!)
• Ellen reacts to stuff. This might not seem like much of a storyline, but she gets some brilliant lines, such as, "You have always had a sort of royal attitude about you, Janet...You're kind of bossy," and, "We could fly away while you stayed behind and got buried in lava, couldn't we?" Love her.
Sadly, so many of these storylines would be destroyed if everyone had the internet. I mean, Janet would just look up the princess on Wikipedia to see if there was a loophole to the curse. Instead, she just swans around the hotel and makes the other Unicorns call her Princess Keiko and bow in her presence.
Anyway, the girls suffer a string of coincidences which convince them that they really are cursed. Janet and Lila climb a volcano - and it erupts! (They mistake bulldozers for the rumbling and the shaking of the ground, and the sun coming out from behind a cloud for a dramatic increase in temperature.) The Unicorns go out to sea in a glass-bottom boat - and Jess falls out and nearly drowns! (The water is literally three feet deep.) I love this book because it's not afraid to poke fun at all the dramatic shit that usually happens to these girls.
Actually, the boat episode is particularly brilliant because we get this:
"Are you from Hawaii?" she [Janet] asked the smaller boy, who looked to Jessica to be about six years old.
"Yes, ma'am," he said seriously.
"Do I look familiar to you?" Janet asked.
"Not again, Janet!" Jessica groaned.
"Have you ever seen me before?" Janet continued, smiling regally at the little boy.
"No, ma'am," he said quietly.
"Well, have you ever seen one of these before?" Janet asked, pointing to her mole.
The little boy's lips began to quiver, and suddenly he burst into tears.
"Stop poking your mole at people, Janet," Lila said crossly. "You're scaring them."
As the boat began to move, the little boy crawled into his grandmother's arms, staring at Janet and sniffling softly.
"I only thought - " Janet began.
"We know what you thought, Janet," Jessica said, rolling her eyes.
BWAH! I love Janet almost as much as I love Ellen. They could've pared the characters down to just Jess, Janet, Ellen, and Lila and I'd have been pretty okay with that.
Mandy and Mary let Jessica, Ellen and Janet in on their discovery that Lila's going to have a new stepmother ("Who?" gasps Ellen), and they break into Bambi's room to look for clues. Unfortunately they find nothing - except a shade of eyeshadow called "Silver Unicorn". Jessica, Ellen, and Janet squeal. Suddenly in comes Bambi and the girls all have to hide. They eavesdrop while she talks on the phone, mentioning that she hopes she'll be a beautiful bride but she's worried that she has no maternal instincts. Jess wonders what they'll do with this information, but the ghost-writer's phrasing is strangely ominous, making it seem as though Jess is a mafia boss. Eventually, however, they decide to tell Lila, who is devastated.
At Mary's suggestion, everyone goes windsurfing. Seriously, why is she in this book? I realise there needs to be a sensible character among the kids, but surely Mandy fills that role? Example of Mary's dullness: in the SVT book Three's A Crowd, Mary is obsessed with Alice Wakefield. Now, think of all the other characters who have been obsessed with Wakefields: Tatiana Mueller tries to steal Alice's face; Psycho Margo tries to steal both Liz AND Jess' identities; William White...Well, I'm not sure what his end goal actually was, but he sent Liz roses and stole her scarf and was generally pretty darn creepy. How does Mary exhibit her obsession with Alice? She HELPS HER DO THE DISHES. My point, I think, is obvious.
Anyway, back to the book. Everything comes to a climax after a particularly disastrous dinner. No recap of mine can do justice to how amazing the dinner scene is, so I'll just quote Mandy's summary of it: "I thought it was pretty entertaining. It's a tough call which part was funniest, though - Janet sitting in a pile of cole slaw, Lila's mega-burp, or Jessica's chair gymnastics."
Kenji tells Jess that to escape her curse, she has to perform an ancient sacred ritual at midnight, which involves a candle, diet soda, and putting her hair into a ponytail. Seriously, can I nominate Kenji for Best One-Off Character Ever? I love the way he messes with the Unicorns' minds. He also tells Lila that the only way the ring will come off is if she goes to the tomb of King Kamehameha at midnight and removes it there. The two girls try to carry out their various tasks but are busted when they wake everyone up.
Putting two and two together, the girls work out that Kenji has tricked them all - and it's time for revenge. They coerce Bambi into dressing up as the goddess Pele and, with the help of a little black lighting and a generous helping of fluorescent paint, she scares Kenji into apologising to the girls. His excuse? He did it for the lulz. He and his friend Lono ask all six girls out - it's a fairly masterful manoeuvre, actually, and I'm kind of impressed that they have the balls - and they accept. Wait, what?
And everything is tied up! Lila wasn't cursed - the ring was just a cheap tourist trinket which was hard to get off! (There's actually a pretty subtle joke here, as throughout the book Lila constantly rags on Bambi's tacky taste in jewellery.) "Jessica Wakely" was due to an incorrect memo! Bambi was auditioning for a part in Days of Turmoil, Jess' favourite soap opera, and was reading her lines with George Fowler! (She's trying out for the part of Flame, who's actually a Days of Turmoil character who's mentioned a couple of times in the SVT series. Go, go, Continuity Rangers!)
Considering how brilliant the rest of the book it, the ending is kind of disappointing. Jess, Mandy, and Mary all throw coins into the sea and make a wish. I'm considering crossing out the final paragraphs and writing my own ending, where Elvis shows up and hands out Mai Tais before pushing Janet in the pool. I suggest you all do the same.
It is ridiculous. It is FABULOUS. It is The Unicorns Go Hawaiian. Cha-cha-cha!
(Is it mean of me to note that none of the Unicorns look very pretty on this cover? I also can't believe that Jessica rather than Janet - whom I'm assuming is the drunk girl with the ugly fringe at the top - is in the centre of this picture, but I suppose the series is called Sweet Valley Twins. My guess at who the characters framing Jess are, from left to right: Lila, Mary, Janet, Mandy, Ellen.)
Incidentally, I came across the following review on Amazon:
Mindless, stupid, 21 Jul 1997
Reviewer: A reader
Mindless, stupid, unsophisticated and sexist junk featuring the "oh so californian sweetharts" on the world's biggest quest: to find a dress for the school prom. Quite a disgrace to young adult books. Pure nonsense. What a joke.
I feel disproportionately offended by this review. Shut up, A reader, if that is in fact your real name! As there is not so much as a mention of a prom dress in The Unicorns Go Hawaiian, I put it to you that you did not even READ the book and that you are making things up! Oh, yes. I WENT THERE. Moreover, if you had read it, you would have known that it is BRILLIANT. Moreover also, YOUR MOM.
Anyway, the book. Jess is a terrible cook, but she decides to enter a pineapple-themed cooking competition in a magazine as a joke. Spurred on by Mandy Miller, she makes a pineapple potato salad for the Pineapple People, and throws in anchovies, chocolate chips, peppermint extract, and green food colouring, calling it "Poisonous Potato Salad". That sounds so gross but also so much fun. I wish I was twelve again.
Two months later, everyone's forgotten about the cooking competition. While shopping for presents at the mall, Liz and Jess discuss the family's plans to visit their grandparents at a ski lodge after Christmas. Jess isn't looking forward to skiing because she's afraid of getting a runny nose. Then Amy shows up. Amy is ugly in this series and doesn't care about dating tennis players, so Jess makes a quick escape over to where the Unicorns are hanging out by the frozen yoghurt counter. Jess says:
"Where do you guys want to go shopping first?"
Lila shrugged. "I don't really care. I was going to get a new outfit for Christmas dinner, but..."
"But what?" Jessica pressed.
"But now that I know Bambi's going to be there, I don't really care what I wear! Maybe I'll just wear my sweatpants and a smelly old T-shirt."
"Who's Bambi?" Jessica asked.
"You know, the baby deer," Ellen answered. "Thumper's friend."
Seriously, I'm amazed that Ellen is capable of getting dressed in the morning without putting her clothes on back-to-front.
Bambi is in fact George Fowler's new girlfriend - an actress. Lila hates her because "she's a bimbo". Says the Unicorn. Lila's dad has been spending all his time with her, and considering that Lila is fairly starved for attention anyway, she's sick of Bambi taking up even more of his time. I'm sort of on both sides here. On the one hand, we all know that Lila's dad sucks, and he clearly doesn't give a shit about her concerns in this book. On the other hand, Lila is pretty obnoxious to Bambi who is nothing but nice to her. It's a toss-up!
At school, Lila rushes in with big news, a magazine in hand. Jess has won the cooking competition! Her first prize? Jess rather sweetly suggests, "A zillion cans of pineapple?" But no, it's much better than that! It's a trip to Hawaii for three!
Thrilled to be given an opportunity to skip the ski trip, Jess invites Mandy and Mary Wallace to go with her, thus hurting Lila's feelings because as Jess' best friend and the person responsible for alerting Jess to the competition results, Lila feels as though she should have been invited. On this issue I'm on Lila's side - true, Lila's been on lots of holidays before, but other than the reasons already mentioned, Jess knows that Lila hasn't been feeling her best lately because of Bambi. Lila is like, "I don't think that my father, the inventor of Toaster-Strudel, will be too pleased to hear about this."
But when Jess gets home that night, her parents have some terrible news. They're not letting her go without a chaperone! I don't blame Jess for being surprised by this decision - I'm pretty alarmed myself whenever Ned and Alice act responsibly. There's a chapter break immediately after this revelation to heighten the drama, but given that the front cover of the book shows smiley girls dressed in swimsuits and leis, I'm not too concerned.
An excited Lila phones to tell Jess that she's convinced her father to send Janet Howell, Ellen Riteman, and herself to Hawaii along with the others, with George Fowler acting as chaperone, and Jess suddenly sees the solution to her problem. She'll get Ned to phone George Fowler and arrange for him to chaperone herself, Mandy and Mary as well! Lila's dad is in the Fowlers' sauna but Lila reassures Jess that he'll pick up as there's a phone in every room in her mansion. Continuity!
Ned and Alice, in a valiant attempt to continue their "responsible parent" streak, express some concern over Lila's dad's capabilities as a supervisor of six pubescent girls, but eventually they just say, "Fuck it," and let Jess go. You know, sometimes all you can do is sit back and laugh at their half-assed attempts at parenting. Jess excitedly begins to pack, although she considers just stuffing a swimsuit in her bag and spending every moment of her vacation on the beach. Mmmm, melanoma.
And at last the six girls, plus George Fowler and Bambi, are off! It's kind of harsh that the other, unloved Unicorns, like Tamara and Kimberley, are stuck at home with their bulimia and self-loathing while these six go to Hawaii. If I were them, I'd hate to be sitting at the Unicorner come the first day of spring semester. There's this whole conversation centred around the fact that Lila, Janet, and Mandy are the only girls who have ever set foot on a plane before, and I remember being obnoxiously smug reading this as an nine-year-old kid because I'd flown to lots of places. Ellen sees the stewardess and dorks out over her uniform. I kind of love Ellen. What happened to her after The Unicorn Club series ended? Also, why hasn't anyone recapped any of those books? I want answers, damnit!
When they arrive in Hawaii, they divide up the rooms. Interestingly - considering that their relationship is supposed to be so serious - Bambi isn't sharing a room with Lila's dad. Are they not having the sex? Or is it a pretence for Lila's benefit? Because I have to say, my confidence in George Fowler is so low that I can only think of one reason why he'd be dating a blonde actress. Anyway, Lila's dad comes in and announces his intention to lay down some ground rules, in order to be a responsible chaperone. George Fowler's Rules For Girls:
Mr. Fowler sat down on the edge of one of the beds while the group watched him expectantly. His brow was furrowed and he seemed to be concentrating very hard. Suddenly his eyes lit up. "To start with, I don't want you spending your money on inferior quality merchandise," he instructed forcefully. "Shop carefully, and avoid tacky souvenir peddlers." He crossed his arms over his chest, apparently satisfied.
For a moment, nobody spoke. "Is - is that it?" Mandy finally ventured.
"Trust me, it's good advice," Mr. Fowler said. He stood abruptly.
Indeed. Fortunately, Bambi offers to pitch in with childcare. Then there's half a chapter of pretty good Lila POV, Lila fans! She lies on the beach with her towel and sunglasses and cynically reflects on how naïve Jess is. All she needs is a martini in hand to complete the picture. Fun fact: this book was the first place where young daniellafromage heard the word "naïve"!
The characters then split up for much of the rest of the book.
• Janet meets cute boy Kenji, who convinces her that she's a reincarnation of a Hawaiian princess. She looks exactly like her, even down to the mole on the side of her lip. If she ever tries to leave Hawaii, Kenji tells her, then Pele - the volcano goddess, not the footballer - will erupt. When Janet tries to appease Pele by bribing her with a curling iron and a Johnny Buck cassette, Kenji tells her that even though she just considered about going back to Sweet Valley, she's cursed.
• While sunbathing on the beach, Lila comes across a beautiful expensive-looking red ring which she eagerly slips on. Unfortunately, she can't get it off again, even when she recruits the help of a surfer she meets on the beach (who, hilariously, suggests that her finger is "too fat". Ha ha! Ouch!). Lila runs into Kenji, who tells her that the ring was buried with King Kamehameha, and because she stole it, she's cursed.
• Jessica becomes convinced that she isn't the real competition winner after everyone at the Pineapple People headquarters calls her "Jessica Wakely", but she keeps quiet because she's afraid that she'll be sent home. Kenji shows up again and tells her that because she didn't own up to identity theft, she's cursed.
• Mandy and Mary run about like headless chickens as they overhear a few conversations and become convinced that George Fowler and Bambi are getting married. Oh, and Mary learns to surf. I wish they'd dropped Mary from this book and replaced her with Bruce Patman. I said in my last recap that I'm no fan of Bruce, but at least his storylines are rarely boring. Man, even freaking Todd would be a better choice. (He could go whale-watching!)
• Ellen reacts to stuff. This might not seem like much of a storyline, but she gets some brilliant lines, such as, "You have always had a sort of royal attitude about you, Janet...You're kind of bossy," and, "We could fly away while you stayed behind and got buried in lava, couldn't we?" Love her.
Sadly, so many of these storylines would be destroyed if everyone had the internet. I mean, Janet would just look up the princess on Wikipedia to see if there was a loophole to the curse. Instead, she just swans around the hotel and makes the other Unicorns call her Princess Keiko and bow in her presence.
Anyway, the girls suffer a string of coincidences which convince them that they really are cursed. Janet and Lila climb a volcano - and it erupts! (They mistake bulldozers for the rumbling and the shaking of the ground, and the sun coming out from behind a cloud for a dramatic increase in temperature.) The Unicorns go out to sea in a glass-bottom boat - and Jess falls out and nearly drowns! (The water is literally three feet deep.) I love this book because it's not afraid to poke fun at all the dramatic shit that usually happens to these girls.
Actually, the boat episode is particularly brilliant because we get this:
"Are you from Hawaii?" she [Janet] asked the smaller boy, who looked to Jessica to be about six years old.
"Yes, ma'am," he said seriously.
"Do I look familiar to you?" Janet asked.
"Not again, Janet!" Jessica groaned.
"Have you ever seen me before?" Janet continued, smiling regally at the little boy.
"No, ma'am," he said quietly.
"Well, have you ever seen one of these before?" Janet asked, pointing to her mole.
The little boy's lips began to quiver, and suddenly he burst into tears.
"Stop poking your mole at people, Janet," Lila said crossly. "You're scaring them."
As the boat began to move, the little boy crawled into his grandmother's arms, staring at Janet and sniffling softly.
"I only thought - " Janet began.
"We know what you thought, Janet," Jessica said, rolling her eyes.
BWAH! I love Janet almost as much as I love Ellen. They could've pared the characters down to just Jess, Janet, Ellen, and Lila and I'd have been pretty okay with that.
Mandy and Mary let Jessica, Ellen and Janet in on their discovery that Lila's going to have a new stepmother ("Who?" gasps Ellen), and they break into Bambi's room to look for clues. Unfortunately they find nothing - except a shade of eyeshadow called "Silver Unicorn". Jessica, Ellen, and Janet squeal. Suddenly in comes Bambi and the girls all have to hide. They eavesdrop while she talks on the phone, mentioning that she hopes she'll be a beautiful bride but she's worried that she has no maternal instincts. Jess wonders what they'll do with this information, but the ghost-writer's phrasing is strangely ominous, making it seem as though Jess is a mafia boss. Eventually, however, they decide to tell Lila, who is devastated.
At Mary's suggestion, everyone goes windsurfing. Seriously, why is she in this book? I realise there needs to be a sensible character among the kids, but surely Mandy fills that role? Example of Mary's dullness: in the SVT book Three's A Crowd, Mary is obsessed with Alice Wakefield. Now, think of all the other characters who have been obsessed with Wakefields: Tatiana Mueller tries to steal Alice's face; Psycho Margo tries to steal both Liz AND Jess' identities; William White...Well, I'm not sure what his end goal actually was, but he sent Liz roses and stole her scarf and was generally pretty darn creepy. How does Mary exhibit her obsession with Alice? She HELPS HER DO THE DISHES. My point, I think, is obvious.
Anyway, back to the book. Everything comes to a climax after a particularly disastrous dinner. No recap of mine can do justice to how amazing the dinner scene is, so I'll just quote Mandy's summary of it: "I thought it was pretty entertaining. It's a tough call which part was funniest, though - Janet sitting in a pile of cole slaw, Lila's mega-burp, or Jessica's chair gymnastics."
Kenji tells Jess that to escape her curse, she has to perform an ancient sacred ritual at midnight, which involves a candle, diet soda, and putting her hair into a ponytail. Seriously, can I nominate Kenji for Best One-Off Character Ever? I love the way he messes with the Unicorns' minds. He also tells Lila that the only way the ring will come off is if she goes to the tomb of King Kamehameha at midnight and removes it there. The two girls try to carry out their various tasks but are busted when they wake everyone up.
Putting two and two together, the girls work out that Kenji has tricked them all - and it's time for revenge. They coerce Bambi into dressing up as the goddess Pele and, with the help of a little black lighting and a generous helping of fluorescent paint, she scares Kenji into apologising to the girls. His excuse? He did it for the lulz. He and his friend Lono ask all six girls out - it's a fairly masterful manoeuvre, actually, and I'm kind of impressed that they have the balls - and they accept. Wait, what?
And everything is tied up! Lila wasn't cursed - the ring was just a cheap tourist trinket which was hard to get off! (There's actually a pretty subtle joke here, as throughout the book Lila constantly rags on Bambi's tacky taste in jewellery.) "Jessica Wakely" was due to an incorrect memo! Bambi was auditioning for a part in Days of Turmoil, Jess' favourite soap opera, and was reading her lines with George Fowler! (She's trying out for the part of Flame, who's actually a Days of Turmoil character who's mentioned a couple of times in the SVT series. Go, go, Continuity Rangers!)
Considering how brilliant the rest of the book it, the ending is kind of disappointing. Jess, Mandy, and Mary all throw coins into the sea and make a wish. I'm considering crossing out the final paragraphs and writing my own ending, where Elvis shows up and hands out Mai Tais before pushing Janet in the pool. I suggest you all do the same.