The Patmans of Sweet Valley, (Sweet Valley Saga Magna Edition)
The Patmans of Sweet Valley, (Sweet Valley Saga Magna Edition)
Because I love Bruce Patman, even if he is kind of evil. Hey, at least he’s better then Todd. :)
We start in 1825 with Sophie, Duchess of Edmonton, breaking the rules to go swimming in her family’s lake.
So that’s the Wakefields being descended from… I think he was a Lord, Lila being descended from a French Duchess and now Bruce, who is also descended from a Duchess. Come on, ghostwriter, they can’t all be aristocrats.
Of course, this does set up the love story well. (The same love story as The Fowlers of Sweet Valley~ http://community.livejournal.com/1bruce1/41075.html , actually, although in this one no one gets beheaded or fake married)
Because of course as Sophie is swimming, the mysterious stranger/new stable hand Henry Patman wanders by. They flirt, he calls her a mermaid, and then he leaves. Sophie is charmed.
In her bedroom later, Sophie listens to her sister Melanie go on and on about how handsome the new stable boy is, and how she’s decided to have an affair with him to keep from being bored while she waits for Sophie to be married off.
At dinner Sophie finally realizes that Henry Patman and the hot stable boy are the same person, and despite the fact that her father would never allow her to marry someone who wasn’t rich like she is, and Melanie likes him (this will be important later), she decides maybe she’ll “go horseback riding” the next day anyway.
They start meeting secretly, Henry writes her a mermaid poem, and of course they fall in love. After Lord Edmonton starts putting pressure on Sophie to accept one of her boring-but-rich suitors, Henry realizes they’ll have to run away together, and proposes:
"I know I'm a commoner, and as poor as a church mouse. And I know your father will never consent to the match. But legally, we don't need his permission. Being with you and making you happy are the only things that matter to me. Will you be my wife?"
Awww. Sophie says yes, they plan to run away together the next night, and it seems like everything will work out. But of course it won't.
We cut to Melanie, reading the latest entry in Sophie’s diary (Rule #1 for conducting a secret affair~ don’t write your elopement plans down! If you absolutely need to write your plans down- maybe Sophie has a bad memory- at least carry the fucking diary around with you!) Sigh.
So Sophie and Henry are about to ride away on what are apparently stolen horses when her father and brothers appear out of nowhere and force her to come back with them. Henry gets deported.
Melanie’s explanation for ruining Sophie’s marriage: ‘you knew I was interested in him and went after him anyway, now we both don’t get him, so there.’
Sixteen years later, Sophie is married to some rich guy and has a daughter Emma, who, unlike her shallow Mini-Melanie cousins, isn’t that interested in marriage and clothes, and instead wants to be an actress. Her father shoots down that idea, but Sophie, who has been saving money, probably to run away herself, gives it to Emma and sends her on her way.
Meanwhile, in America, Henry, who is still poor and now being chased by people he owes money to, is playing poker with some drunk guys. He manages to win some money and the deed to a plantation in Georgia. He moves down, marries the rich daughter of another plantation owner, has two kids, and is now rich, finally.
This, I’m guessing, isn’t the money that Bruce Patman inherits, however, because a couple of years later, the Civil War breaks out.
Henry’s son, (whose name I thought was John, but according to Amazon’s recap, John is the name of his son. Hmmm, okay. I’m almost positive it’s a J-name, though, so I’m going to call him James). Anyway, ‘James’ argues with Henry and his grandfather about the war, and when they ask him what he’s going to do when it comes to choosing sides, he decided to leave the plantation.
We catch up to him a few years later, as a worker for the Underground Railroad. He falls in love with a former slave, Hope, and ends up marrying her.
Unfortunately, Hope (and the people she was staying with) are murdered one day while James is out helping former slaves. He ends up fighting in the war, and comes back to his family’s plantation to find it almost completely abandoned and destroyed.
A former slave of his tells him that his father and brother both died in separate battles (and ironically the brother died in the same battle James fought in, so I guess we’re lucky the ghostwriter spared us the scene where James sees his younger brother for the first time in years and then has to kill him), and both his grandfather and his mother died of illnesses.
James decides to head west, and presumably gets over Hope, because the next chapter is about his son John.
But back to Emma, who is now married (I think to another actor), has a daughter Phoebe, and a granddaughter Katherine, who are also both actresses.
Katherine is with a traveling actors group, as the main understudy, when she runs into John Patman. Well, faints in the street, and he catches her and gives her lemonade, but either way, they’re of course *in love*. He plans to propose after her final show, but is robbed, tied up and gagged in the back room of
a bar, and unable to get there in time. Katherine and her traveling actors group leave.
John decides to head further west (getting closer and closer to Sweet Valley) to become a bronco rider.
We see him again a little while later, trying to win a competition. He comes in second to a kid who ‘doesn’t even look old enough to shave’. Ha, that sucks. Even though he’s jealous, he’s still kind of impressed, so he goes over to compliment him. The kid won’t look him in the eye, so John grabs his arm, his cowboy hat flies off, and HER long blond hair “tumbles down”. John stares as she rides off.
He meets up with her again, after finding out that her name is Samantha (although not the same Samantha who we meet in ‘The Wakefields of Sweet Valley’ book, because she’s too busy being a movie star and setting up random Wakefields for crimes). This Samantha tells John she’s not looking for a relationship with a cowboy, because she saw how he was looking at her earlier, and he has the lamest comeback ever, which is that he’s *not* interested (so there) and just wanted to talk to her about horses, before storming off in a huff.
They meet again when John sees her campfire, and after talking and arguing some more, they start making out.
The next scene is their wedding, and first couple years on a very poor ranch, before John discovers oil on their ranch and they become millionaires. (*There’s* the money)
Meanwhile, Katherine finds out that her whole family has been killed in a fire, and decides to stay in New York, where she marries some guy not important enough to have a whole chapter devoted to him, so I have no idea what his name is.
Her daughter’s name is Cassandra, and she decides to become a doctor and start working in a hospital in England during World War II. There she meets Spencer Light and they get married. She even sends a letter to her parents saying, ‘I know this is going to be kind of a shock, but I married some soldier today. Surprise!’
But like all the doomed World War II Sweet Valley romances (Isabelle and Jacques, Majorie and… a different Jacques. Wow. Way to be original with all the French names, ghostwriter), their romance is doomed from the start, he dies, and Spencer’s best friend Peter Vanderhorn has to come break the news.
Turns out Cassandra was pregnant with Spencer’s baby and she ends up miscarrying.
Years later, after the war is over, she and Peter start spending more time together, and he proposes under a tree they like to sit under. Cassandra tells him she can’t and runs away.
Peter goes to talk to Katherine, and finds out that Cassandra knows he wants kids, but after her miscarriage she found out she wouldn’t be able to have any more. He decides he doesn’t care, and proposes again. This time she says yes and they gets married. Then Spencer shows up alive! No, I’m kidding, wrong book.
Back to John and Samantha, who now have a son William at Harvard. He’s kind of a loud Texas hick (but a rich one, so it’s okay), and he falls in love with one of his roommate’s friends, Helena. She thinks he’s unsophisticated, but after he spends weeks and weeks learning how to dance for her and fit in with her friends, she falls in love with him too.
He decides to propose in the most adorable way ever, which is to sweet-talk her dorm lady into letting him bring a two-person bike and a bouquet of daisies in (you can probably tell where this is going) and ends up serenading her in front of all her friends with the ‘Bicycle Built For Two’ song.
She’s embarrassed as hell, but when she looks at him kneeling at her feet and realizes how terrified he is that she’ll say no, she yells ‘Yes!’ and they ride out together on the bike. Best. Scene. Ever.
They have a baby with a birthmark that looks like Texas on his arm, but it disappears one day before they take him home from the hospital. Hmmm, interesting…
Then the baby dies, and we cut immediately to Reginald, the oldest son of a poor family who has to start working after his father dies. And whose company does he end up working for? Willliam Patman’s. What a coincidence!
Helena at first thinks she’s going crazy, because this new assistant of her husbands looks a hell of a lot like him, but through a lot of obsessive questioning and more strange coincidences, she starts to think that maybe this Reginald is her baby.
Reginald and his girlfriend May come over for lunch one day, and when Reginald pulls off his shirt to go swimming, Helena starts freaking out about the birthmark on his arm shaped like Texas.
William tries to calm her down, but after hearing all of her research about the only other little boy born at the hospital that night, he finally starts to realize that she might be right.
Reginald thinks this is crazy, and turns to William for help, but he’s too busy staring at him, finally noticing that his guy whose been working for him all these years might sort of look exactly like him. Reginald storms off.
May decides to find out what really happened, and she tracks down a nurse who admits that the babies’ bracelets fell off when she was giving them a bath, and she was too afraid of getting fired to tell her supervisor.
Reginald makes up with the Patmans, and proposes to May under a tree with the names ‘Cassandra and Peter’ (nice tie-in) carved into it. She teases him about what her last name will be, and then says yes.
Then we meet Marie Vanderhorn and Hank Patman, who are about to graduate high school and are engaged. Marie faints at a party, but tells Hank she’s fine and that he should go on his road trip with his younger brother.
Turns out she’s not fine, and she has leukemia. Marie realizes that she doesn’t want Hank to have to watch her die, and breaks up with him in a letter. He finally gets her on the phone, and can’t believe it when she tells him she doesn’t love him anymore.
He’s about to turn around and drive back to New York, but his brother Paul convinces him that Marie is probably just freaking out about getting married and going to college and the last thing he should do is smother her. Stupidly, Hank listens, and stays in California for college.
There he meets Alice Robertson (the future Alice Wakefield), and even though he doesn’t love her like he loved Marie, proposes anyway, and they’re about to walk down the isle when she breaks up with him.
A few years later, in Sweet Valley, he runs into Marie (who didn’t die) and she decides that she should tell him the truth. She gives him one of the hundreds of letters she wrote while in the hospital, and he can’t believe she went through all the chemotherapy and cancer all by herself.
She tells him that whenever she was in too much pain, she would take out the locket he gave her (which was given to the original Henry Patman by Sophie) and think about him, and he pulls out the silver ring (Henry to Sophie), that had been in her family for years, that Hank still wears, from under his shirt. They start kissing, and the scene cuts to a year later, with them trying to name their baby son.
They want an original strong name, but not too hippy-ish, and settle on Bruce. ☺
The End.
Because I love Bruce Patman, even if he is kind of evil. Hey, at least he’s better then Todd. :)
We start in 1825 with Sophie, Duchess of Edmonton, breaking the rules to go swimming in her family’s lake.
So that’s the Wakefields being descended from… I think he was a Lord, Lila being descended from a French Duchess and now Bruce, who is also descended from a Duchess. Come on, ghostwriter, they can’t all be aristocrats.
Of course, this does set up the love story well. (The same love story as The Fowlers of Sweet Valley~ http://community.livejournal.com/1bruce1/41075.html , actually, although in this one no one gets beheaded or fake married)
Because of course as Sophie is swimming, the mysterious stranger/new stable hand Henry Patman wanders by. They flirt, he calls her a mermaid, and then he leaves. Sophie is charmed.
In her bedroom later, Sophie listens to her sister Melanie go on and on about how handsome the new stable boy is, and how she’s decided to have an affair with him to keep from being bored while she waits for Sophie to be married off.
At dinner Sophie finally realizes that Henry Patman and the hot stable boy are the same person, and despite the fact that her father would never allow her to marry someone who wasn’t rich like she is, and Melanie likes him (this will be important later), she decides maybe she’ll “go horseback riding” the next day anyway.
They start meeting secretly, Henry writes her a mermaid poem, and of course they fall in love. After Lord Edmonton starts putting pressure on Sophie to accept one of her boring-but-rich suitors, Henry realizes they’ll have to run away together, and proposes:
"I know I'm a commoner, and as poor as a church mouse. And I know your father will never consent to the match. But legally, we don't need his permission. Being with you and making you happy are the only things that matter to me. Will you be my wife?"
Awww. Sophie says yes, they plan to run away together the next night, and it seems like everything will work out. But of course it won't.
We cut to Melanie, reading the latest entry in Sophie’s diary (Rule #1 for conducting a secret affair~ don’t write your elopement plans down! If you absolutely need to write your plans down- maybe Sophie has a bad memory- at least carry the fucking diary around with you!) Sigh.
So Sophie and Henry are about to ride away on what are apparently stolen horses when her father and brothers appear out of nowhere and force her to come back with them. Henry gets deported.
Melanie’s explanation for ruining Sophie’s marriage: ‘you knew I was interested in him and went after him anyway, now we both don’t get him, so there.’
Sixteen years later, Sophie is married to some rich guy and has a daughter Emma, who, unlike her shallow Mini-Melanie cousins, isn’t that interested in marriage and clothes, and instead wants to be an actress. Her father shoots down that idea, but Sophie, who has been saving money, probably to run away herself, gives it to Emma and sends her on her way.
Meanwhile, in America, Henry, who is still poor and now being chased by people he owes money to, is playing poker with some drunk guys. He manages to win some money and the deed to a plantation in Georgia. He moves down, marries the rich daughter of another plantation owner, has two kids, and is now rich, finally.
This, I’m guessing, isn’t the money that Bruce Patman inherits, however, because a couple of years later, the Civil War breaks out.
Henry’s son, (whose name I thought was John, but according to Amazon’s recap, John is the name of his son. Hmmm, okay. I’m almost positive it’s a J-name, though, so I’m going to call him James). Anyway, ‘James’ argues with Henry and his grandfather about the war, and when they ask him what he’s going to do when it comes to choosing sides, he decided to leave the plantation.
We catch up to him a few years later, as a worker for the Underground Railroad. He falls in love with a former slave, Hope, and ends up marrying her.
Unfortunately, Hope (and the people she was staying with) are murdered one day while James is out helping former slaves. He ends up fighting in the war, and comes back to his family’s plantation to find it almost completely abandoned and destroyed.
A former slave of his tells him that his father and brother both died in separate battles (and ironically the brother died in the same battle James fought in, so I guess we’re lucky the ghostwriter spared us the scene where James sees his younger brother for the first time in years and then has to kill him), and both his grandfather and his mother died of illnesses.
James decides to head west, and presumably gets over Hope, because the next chapter is about his son John.
But back to Emma, who is now married (I think to another actor), has a daughter Phoebe, and a granddaughter Katherine, who are also both actresses.
Katherine is with a traveling actors group, as the main understudy, when she runs into John Patman. Well, faints in the street, and he catches her and gives her lemonade, but either way, they’re of course *in love*. He plans to propose after her final show, but is robbed, tied up and gagged in the back room of
a bar, and unable to get there in time. Katherine and her traveling actors group leave.
John decides to head further west (getting closer and closer to Sweet Valley) to become a bronco rider.
We see him again a little while later, trying to win a competition. He comes in second to a kid who ‘doesn’t even look old enough to shave’. Ha, that sucks. Even though he’s jealous, he’s still kind of impressed, so he goes over to compliment him. The kid won’t look him in the eye, so John grabs his arm, his cowboy hat flies off, and HER long blond hair “tumbles down”. John stares as she rides off.
He meets up with her again, after finding out that her name is Samantha (although not the same Samantha who we meet in ‘The Wakefields of Sweet Valley’ book, because she’s too busy being a movie star and setting up random Wakefields for crimes). This Samantha tells John she’s not looking for a relationship with a cowboy, because she saw how he was looking at her earlier, and he has the lamest comeback ever, which is that he’s *not* interested (so there) and just wanted to talk to her about horses, before storming off in a huff.
They meet again when John sees her campfire, and after talking and arguing some more, they start making out.
The next scene is their wedding, and first couple years on a very poor ranch, before John discovers oil on their ranch and they become millionaires. (*There’s* the money)
Meanwhile, Katherine finds out that her whole family has been killed in a fire, and decides to stay in New York, where she marries some guy not important enough to have a whole chapter devoted to him, so I have no idea what his name is.
Her daughter’s name is Cassandra, and she decides to become a doctor and start working in a hospital in England during World War II. There she meets Spencer Light and they get married. She even sends a letter to her parents saying, ‘I know this is going to be kind of a shock, but I married some soldier today. Surprise!’
But like all the doomed World War II Sweet Valley romances (Isabelle and Jacques, Majorie and… a different Jacques. Wow. Way to be original with all the French names, ghostwriter), their romance is doomed from the start, he dies, and Spencer’s best friend Peter Vanderhorn has to come break the news.
Turns out Cassandra was pregnant with Spencer’s baby and she ends up miscarrying.
Years later, after the war is over, she and Peter start spending more time together, and he proposes under a tree they like to sit under. Cassandra tells him she can’t and runs away.
Peter goes to talk to Katherine, and finds out that Cassandra knows he wants kids, but after her miscarriage she found out she wouldn’t be able to have any more. He decides he doesn’t care, and proposes again. This time she says yes and they gets married. Then Spencer shows up alive! No, I’m kidding, wrong book.
Back to John and Samantha, who now have a son William at Harvard. He’s kind of a loud Texas hick (but a rich one, so it’s okay), and he falls in love with one of his roommate’s friends, Helena. She thinks he’s unsophisticated, but after he spends weeks and weeks learning how to dance for her and fit in with her friends, she falls in love with him too.
He decides to propose in the most adorable way ever, which is to sweet-talk her dorm lady into letting him bring a two-person bike and a bouquet of daisies in (you can probably tell where this is going) and ends up serenading her in front of all her friends with the ‘Bicycle Built For Two’ song.
She’s embarrassed as hell, but when she looks at him kneeling at her feet and realizes how terrified he is that she’ll say no, she yells ‘Yes!’ and they ride out together on the bike. Best. Scene. Ever.
They have a baby with a birthmark that looks like Texas on his arm, but it disappears one day before they take him home from the hospital. Hmmm, interesting…
Then the baby dies, and we cut immediately to Reginald, the oldest son of a poor family who has to start working after his father dies. And whose company does he end up working for? Willliam Patman’s. What a coincidence!
Helena at first thinks she’s going crazy, because this new assistant of her husbands looks a hell of a lot like him, but through a lot of obsessive questioning and more strange coincidences, she starts to think that maybe this Reginald is her baby.
Reginald and his girlfriend May come over for lunch one day, and when Reginald pulls off his shirt to go swimming, Helena starts freaking out about the birthmark on his arm shaped like Texas.
William tries to calm her down, but after hearing all of her research about the only other little boy born at the hospital that night, he finally starts to realize that she might be right.
Reginald thinks this is crazy, and turns to William for help, but he’s too busy staring at him, finally noticing that his guy whose been working for him all these years might sort of look exactly like him. Reginald storms off.
May decides to find out what really happened, and she tracks down a nurse who admits that the babies’ bracelets fell off when she was giving them a bath, and she was too afraid of getting fired to tell her supervisor.
Reginald makes up with the Patmans, and proposes to May under a tree with the names ‘Cassandra and Peter’ (nice tie-in) carved into it. She teases him about what her last name will be, and then says yes.
Then we meet Marie Vanderhorn and Hank Patman, who are about to graduate high school and are engaged. Marie faints at a party, but tells Hank she’s fine and that he should go on his road trip with his younger brother.
Turns out she’s not fine, and she has leukemia. Marie realizes that she doesn’t want Hank to have to watch her die, and breaks up with him in a letter. He finally gets her on the phone, and can’t believe it when she tells him she doesn’t love him anymore.
He’s about to turn around and drive back to New York, but his brother Paul convinces him that Marie is probably just freaking out about getting married and going to college and the last thing he should do is smother her. Stupidly, Hank listens, and stays in California for college.
There he meets Alice Robertson (the future Alice Wakefield), and even though he doesn’t love her like he loved Marie, proposes anyway, and they’re about to walk down the isle when she breaks up with him.
A few years later, in Sweet Valley, he runs into Marie (who didn’t die) and she decides that she should tell him the truth. She gives him one of the hundreds of letters she wrote while in the hospital, and he can’t believe she went through all the chemotherapy and cancer all by herself.
She tells him that whenever she was in too much pain, she would take out the locket he gave her (which was given to the original Henry Patman by Sophie) and think about him, and he pulls out the silver ring (Henry to Sophie), that had been in her family for years, that Hank still wears, from under his shirt. They start kissing, and the scene cuts to a year later, with them trying to name their baby son.
They want an original strong name, but not too hippy-ish, and settle on Bruce. ☺
The End.