Sweet Valley Saga II Magna Edition: The Wakefield Legacy: The Untold Story (Part Two)
Previously on The Wakefield Legacy: Sarah Wakefield, unwed mother, tells everyone that Ted is the son of her brother James and her (invented) sister-in-law Edwina, who both died in a train crash. She also claims that her father is dead. Hee. I bet she took a vicious pleasure in spreading that story about. I know I would.
I feel kind of depressed about this book because I keep comparing it with The Wakefields of Sweet Valley, and this one just can't live up. It needs, like, dinosaurs and private detectives and time-lords in order to live up to its predecessor's awesome. Don't tell me you couldn't have done it, Francine. We all read the werewolf books. We know what you're capable of. Just stick some guy in a Godzilla costume and have him menace the citizens of Sweet Valley night and day, and we'll call it even.
But whatever. Onwards and upwards!
1924. Even though Sarah has been saving for years, Ted has decided that he doesn't want to go to college for a while yet. He's going to be a journalist first. To get there, he's going to become a waiter at the Black Cat Café, a jazz club, rather than, you know, sending his work off for an established journalist to read or applying for an internship at a newspaper. I don't know.
Ted is a great success as a waiter and one night he meets a pretty African-American girl called Tina. Tina says that she's getting formal training to become a jazz singer. I'm reminded of a recording by Zora Neale Hurston where some guy asks her how she learnt to sing certain songs, and Hurston says that she just listened to a crowd of people singing and she gradually picked up each verse one at a time, then started singing along. In other words, the very OPPOSITE of what Tina is doing. Tina is such a poseur.
The two of them become fast friends - although they don't have a romantic relationship, I should point out - and eventually Tina tells him to send some writing into the Chicago Post. He's offered a regular column, because he is a Wakefield and the Wakefields can't even take a shit without everyone crowding round to admire it.
Ted is pleased that all the money he's making will enable him to buy smart clothes for college, in order to impress pretty girls. I think that's pretty cute. It's not particularly the sentiment, but the way he phrases it. He thinks about jazz music, and what it means to him in the most pretentious way possible. This is very much not cute. The prose is so horrendously purple here, I'm surprised that the Unicorns haven't had it printed on t-shirts. Ted listens to Tina sing and is all, "omg thats relly gud!" Tina is not mentioned in the story again.
One day, Ted comes home to find Sarah sitting in shock. Theodore has died and left the two of them everything - we don't hear how much it is, but it's supposed to be a sizable amount. Sarah tells Ted the truth and he is, of course, pissed. I knew this would happen! Excuse me while I crow. He decides to go to college just to get away from her.
1925. Ted is roommates (and BFF) (and secret gay lovers) with Harry Watson, the elder brother of Samantha and Amanda. When they're not spending their time dancing with flappers and drinking illegal booze, they're playing tennis and joining exclusive fraternities. I think that the ghost-writer hits almost every Jazz Age cliché in the book. This is the sort of thing Hemingway would have written, had he chosen to go down the Harlequin Romance route.
After a game of tennis, Harry actually says, "I've told you about my gorgeous sixteen-year-old twin sisters, Samantha and Amanda, haven't I?" Ew. Harry, please don't pimp out your jailbait sisters to your college roommate. Ted looks at a picture of Samantha and thinks that she's extremely hot. He says that he'd like to meet both twins. Then: "Harry was clearly pleased at the prospect of a liaison between his best friend and his younger sister." EWWW.
Then we get the events of the previous book from Ted's point of view. I won't bother recapping them. However, we do get to hear that Ted is "genuinely fond" of Samantha, which I guess is nice - I'd half-assumed after the last book that he thought she was just silly and boring. I still think it's stupid that neither he nor Amanda just TELLS Samantha that they're dating, though. I mean, it hurts her much more in the long run.
Then there's a pretty intense scene where Ted and Amanda make out for ages. It's meant to be all passionate and shit, but it is actually the least sexy thing I have ever read. It's a slightly racier version of a Liz/Todd scene, and it actually grosses me out a little bit. It's like reading about your grandparents making out.
Anyway. Blah blah blah. Ted gets arrested. He is released because it is "too clearly a setup", but decides to never see the Watson family again. So he grows a beard and goes to visit the tribe of his great-grandmother, Owl Feather, who was the mother of Dancing Wind. The current Chief tells him, "Your great-grandmother was going to be married to the chief, but she ran off with a white guy instead. Everyone still hates her." Only he gets his Hollywood script-writer to say it for him, so it ends up sounding a lot more spiritual and earth-loving, in the way that all Native Americans clearly are.
Outside the camp, Ted bumps into a rather forward young lady called Julia Marks. She's a wannabe reporter and is investigating a story about the US government screwing over several tribes in the nineteenth century. She comes from a filthy rich family where she's the only child, but she wants to make it as a reporter without any help from her father. She's also incredibly hot. leia_naberrie suggested to me that Julia and Ted are essentially Lois and Clark, and I love that idea. I want fanfiction about this book where they get married and then Julia is replaced by a frog-eating clone, which is what happened in The New Adventures of Superman.
Julia pines after Ted but, as with Dancing Wind and Theodore, he's still hung up on his blonde ex. Eventually Julia convinces Ted to go to Washington D.C. with her. There's some subplot about a treaty and Julia managing to expose the sins of the nineteenth-century government crap, but the ghost-writer takes so many liberties with history that I don't care. And neither should you. It's kind of sad, as "investigative reporters in the 1920s" should make for an awesome story - it slightly predates stuff like Nancy Drew and Superman and His Girl Friday, but only slightly - but the ghost-writer falls down in the execution.
Also, Ted says: "I learned a lot of Awaswan lore from my distant cousins that I can pass on to my children one day." That is just hilarious. I keep typing up snarky comments in response, but nothing can beat that on its own.
Ted tells Julia his entire sordid history, from his illegitimacy to his recent troubles with Amanda. Awesomely, Julia is like, "Wow, that must have been so tough for your mother." In D.C., they make out, but when she blurts out that she loves him, he freaks. Julia lets it go, but later in the week when he starts humming and ha-ing again, she basically says to him, "Look, I get that you had a bad relationship, but that was a while ago, and I'm not like Amanda anyway. If you think you love me, wise up. If you're just dicking me around, shut up." I love Julia. She's too good for Ted.
Anyway, Ted decides to wise up and the two of them get married and move to New York. You know, considering how much money there is on both sides, I'm surprised that the present-day Wakefields aren't richer. I mean, there's all the money Theodore Wakefield made on his farm, and Julia's family are basically the Roosevelts. Then on Alice's side, you have the enormously wealthy Watson family with their motor car empire, and Samantha the movie star. They might not be on the same scale as the Fowlers or the Patmans, but surely the Wakefields should be a little better off than just "comfortable"? Obviously people can lose money (although nothing like that is even implied in either book) and it's not exactly cheap to own a nice house in SoCal, but still. STILL.
1927. Julia and Ted have a baby! A boy, of course, called Robert. At the hospital, Ted reads a newspaper and he sees that Samantha recently died in childbirth. Ted is like, "Hay, I used to date that chick's sister," although he doesn't mention the connection to Julia. You'd have thought that he'd catch up with his old friend Harry to send his condolences, but he doesn't. Julia would've, had she known.
1937. Julia drinks lots of champagne! I knew I liked her. Apparently her office has given a party in her honour. There's a quick recap of the sort of stories she's covered, and I'm going to ignore it because it's a little too much on the Elizabeth Wakefield side of things for my liking. Although I'm sure that Julia handled her stories much more awesomely than Liz does.
She goes to Berlin to become the foreign-correspondent there, although Ted is like, "But you'll be shot by Nazis." In fact, Julia survives the Nazis and instead is killed in the Hindenburg disaster when she travels back to the US. Sucks to be her. I do find it weird, though, that neither side of the family had any family travelling on the Titanic. If nothing else, the ten-year-olds reading these books would be more likely to have heard of the Titanic disaster than the San Francisco earthquake or the Hindenburg.
1943. Robert Wakefield signs up to the navy, EVEN THOUGH HE IS ONLY SIXTEEN. Ted is mad. And sad. And he thinks his son is bad. And that this is just another fad. Although at least he's smartly-clad. I could go on like this forever! Ted tells Robert about Theodore, Ted's grandfather. For some reason they seem to think that he lived an admirable life. Yeah, except for the whole dying-alone-and-unhappy-because-he-deserted-his-pregnant-daughter thing. If Julia were around, she'd set the matter straight.
Robert gets sent to the South Pacific. I'm ashamed to admit that all my knowledge of this part of history comes from the musical South Pacific, and sadly I don't think that knowing the lyrics to Some Enchanted Evening are going to help with this recap. Let's just see how it goes, shall we? He's assigned to receive radio messages from a contact in a woman's prison on the island of Mindanao.
Cut to the contact herself, Hannah Weiss, who will one day marry Robert. Yes, she's Jewish. Yes, this means that Ned Wakefield is Jewish. The narrative says that Hannah is eighteen. That means that she's two years older than Robert! I find this inexplicably exciting. Did the twins ever date a guy who was younger than them (excluding the intern Jessica makes out with at her father's office)? There's some description of life inside the prison, and other than the Japanese guards being jerks and it being, you know, a prison, things don't seem that bad. You know, I will say for this book that it is nowhere near as overtly racist as The Wakefields of Sweet Valley. I was kind of worried when I began recapping this section of the book, as I thought it might start to read like the propaganda section of Superdickery.com. Fortunately, this is not the case!
Anyway. Hannah's friend distracts the guards while she radios Robert. She tells him that things are normal in the prison, and then the two of them have a good old chat about their personal histories. Of course they do. It's not as though Hannah has to hurry back to the other prisoners before her guards notice that she's missing or anything.
1944. Robert and Hannah are in love, even though they haven't met yet. I wish that Hannah were a hunch-backed dwarf with one leg missing, just because I'd like to know what a Wakefield would do if confronted with an ugly love-interest. Robert's friend dies when a Japanese plane kamikazes into their ship. I guess it's meant to be moving but he was only introduced four pages ago, so whatever.
1945. The Japanese surrender. Robert and Hannah meet up and make out. Robert suggests that they get married, even though he is only eighteen. I'm sorry, but that's gross. Legal, but gross. At least date for a while, kids! It's the 1940s! You can go with each other for a while without compromising Hannah's virtue! Ah, baby-boomers.
They get the captain of Robert's ship to marry them. Clearly they didn't read my recap of The Wakefields of Sweet Valley, where I specifically said that ship captains don't have the power to marry people. Not impressed, guys. Not. Impressed. Anyway, so this means that Ned Wakefield is both Jewish and illegitimate. Living in Sweet Valley, it's a good thing that he's not fat as well, otherwise he'd be better off just killing himself.
Some years later. Family gathering. Ned is a couple of months old. Apparently great-grandmother Sarah got remarried at some point and is now Sarah Wakefield-Mayne. That is such a bizarre bit of character information that when I read my notes, I had to go back to the book and check that it actually happened, and I hadn't just made something up to mess with myself. (I've done that in the past. Once time I was bored with the book I was recapping and I wrote in my notes, "Todd pushes himself in the pool." Then I left the recap for a few days and when I returned to my notes, I got really excited.)
Also, baby Ned has a cousin (from Hannah's side of the family) called Rachel. Rachel Weiss. Ned's cousin is very hot.
Early 1960s. Sweet Valley. Hank Patman is hip to Rachel's jive. He wants to tap that ass. Rachel tells him off, possibly for his bad flirting techniques. She's not quite as cool as Julia, but she'll do. Hank leaves her alone and she wanders back to her friends, who are her cousin Ned and some stoner called Seth. (I'm assuming that he's a stoner because he keeps talking about "good vibes".)
Ned name-checks the Beatles, which pretty much places the action of this story in 1964. He slams Count Basie which just, no, then heads off to the beach with Rachel and Seth in order to catch the "perfect wave". It has occurred to me that with his Jewishness, his lawyerness, his familiarity with a guy named Seth, and his love of surfing, Ned is essentially Sandy Cohen from The O.C.. This makes me feel uncomfortable, because while I love Sandy, I have always thought that Ned is lamesauce. The question is, do we want the Wakefields to adopt a stray kid from Chino?
On the way home, the kids meet a kid called Salvador, who's their age but has to work all day rather than go to school because his family are poor immigrants. They're allowed in the country to work, apparently, but that's it. Ned's Saint Elizabeth senses start a-tingling! He decides to get the student council to petition the Board of Education about this, and to do that, he needs signatures from all the council members endorsing it.
But Hank Patman, treasurer, doesn't endorse it. "And neither does Kent, Stan, or Shirley," he tells Ned smugly. Kent, Stan, and Shirley nod. I love Kent, Stan, and Shirley. They sound so generically preppy. I bet Kent secretly wants to be an artist but Hank won't let him, and Shirley works hard in school and always wears nice clothes but sometimes she just can't decide if she has a crush on Stan or Hank. And the three of them sometimes have moments where they dork out - "Oh my gosh, you guys, it's the new Freddie and the Dreamers album!" - and Hank has to scowl at them and be all, "Guys. You are harshing my cool."
Anyway. Ned is like, "Why are you such a penishead, Hank?" and Hank is like, "Because I can afford to be," and he saunters out, presumably leaving Kent, Stan, and Shirley to smile awkwardly at the other student council members.
Nothing comes of the petition and Ned is left with the revelation that sometimes rich people do shitty things. (Again, where has his grandmother Julia's family's money gone? Shouldn't he be fairly rich himself?)
1960s. USC. I'm positing that it's now 1966. I hate myself for caring. Rachel is roommates with some girl who has covered their room in tapestries. So...me, basically. (Yeah. I'm that college kid. Sorry, guys.) In wanders a hallmate of theirs, Becky Foster. Normally she's snobby and only wears tailored suits, but today she's decked out in flowing skirts and beads. She says that she's going to call herself Rainbow now because, she claims, she's one-sixteenth Native American, and is "a prism of personality with many hidden colours and talents". Okay, heh.
We get a glimpse of college Ned's gear, and it's even better than Hank Patman's bellbottoms. He's wearing a tie-dyed t-shirt, cutoffs, and his long brown hair is in a ponytail. Get a haircut, hippie! He meets Rainbow and he's instantly in love. Or at least, his penis is. I'm just sayin'.
Rainbow tells Rachel her plan: she's going to make Ned her boyfriend so that he can do her assignments for her so that she can get into law school. That's a stupid plan, made even more stupid by the fact that she's telling Ned's cousin about it. Of course Rachel tries to warn Ned, but he thinks that she's just being cynical because Rainbow comes from a wealthy family.
Ned and his pals protest some cause and get tear gassed and arrested. Rainbow is furious: she wanted homework answers, not jail time! She dumps Ned's ass and uses her family connections to get her out of jail. Ned, once again, realises that sometimes rich people do shitty things.
A few years later. Ned's final year of college. 1969? I don't know. Ned is still bitter about Rainbow but then he saves this hot blonde from drowning! It's Alice Robertson, obvs. Hank Patman runs up, of course, and Ned is all, "Ah, Hank, my old enemy, we meet again." Actually, he doesn't. He and Hank pretend like they've never met before. Oy.
Ned moons over Alice. They bond over Dylan and he asks her out, but she's all, "Sorry, dude, I'm marrying the Patman." Ned and Rachel contrive to break them up, speculating that "maybe Hank is manipulating Alice the way Becky Foster tried to manipulate Ned freshman year". Or maybe Hank's changed in the six years since they last saw him. Maybe Alice sees something in Hank that neither of them ever bothered to look for. Or maybe - and I'm just thinking out loud here - MAYBE it's none of Ned or Rachel's business who the hell Alice dates.
Ned sits alone in his frat house and plays Blowin' In The Wind ten times in a row. He is relieved that none of his brothers are around to see this display of dorkiness. Aw, I feel you, Ned. An old schoolfriend made me a superheroes-themed mix CD and when my roommates were out yesterday, I grooved out to the Ghostbusters song. Suddenly, Alice shows up! They make out! And with no quarantines to sit through, no bootlegging twin sisters, earthquakes, Nazis, or nefarious racecar drivers, the two of them have nothing to face which will break them up.
A few years later. If the twins were sixteen in 1983, this makes no sense, of course. It might work for the SVT series, though. There's some crap about how Alice's carved rose got passed down from generation to generation and how it looks exactly like the one on Ned's signet ring which has also been passed down but which I haven't bothered to mention until just now. They nearly realise the implications, but then they don't. Whatever.
Ned becomes the youngest senior partner ever in his firm. Alice gets pregnant with twins. They hope they have a girl, and they think about how "the future looked golden for the Wakefields of Sweet Valley". Oh, if only they knew!
And that's the end!
SPECIAL DVD BONUS FEATURES: At the beginning of this book (and the other Saga book as well, actually), there's a family tree, which is a nice touch. Although the tree for The Wakefields of Sweet Valley was fairly boring, we get a few more details about some of the characters in this family tree, which aren't mentioned in the book. For example! Theodore Wakefield's mother is the Lady Sarah Quinlan, his father is the sixteenth Earl of Wakefield, and his brother is James, the fifteenth Viscount Leslie!
END OF SPECIAL DVD BONUS FEATURES.
I feel kind of depressed about this book because I keep comparing it with The Wakefields of Sweet Valley, and this one just can't live up. It needs, like, dinosaurs and private detectives and time-lords in order to live up to its predecessor's awesome. Don't tell me you couldn't have done it, Francine. We all read the werewolf books. We know what you're capable of. Just stick some guy in a Godzilla costume and have him menace the citizens of Sweet Valley night and day, and we'll call it even.
But whatever. Onwards and upwards!
1924. Even though Sarah has been saving for years, Ted has decided that he doesn't want to go to college for a while yet. He's going to be a journalist first. To get there, he's going to become a waiter at the Black Cat Café, a jazz club, rather than, you know, sending his work off for an established journalist to read or applying for an internship at a newspaper. I don't know.
Ted is a great success as a waiter and one night he meets a pretty African-American girl called Tina. Tina says that she's getting formal training to become a jazz singer. I'm reminded of a recording by Zora Neale Hurston where some guy asks her how she learnt to sing certain songs, and Hurston says that she just listened to a crowd of people singing and she gradually picked up each verse one at a time, then started singing along. In other words, the very OPPOSITE of what Tina is doing. Tina is such a poseur.
The two of them become fast friends - although they don't have a romantic relationship, I should point out - and eventually Tina tells him to send some writing into the Chicago Post. He's offered a regular column, because he is a Wakefield and the Wakefields can't even take a shit without everyone crowding round to admire it.
Ted is pleased that all the money he's making will enable him to buy smart clothes for college, in order to impress pretty girls. I think that's pretty cute. It's not particularly the sentiment, but the way he phrases it. He thinks about jazz music, and what it means to him in the most pretentious way possible. This is very much not cute. The prose is so horrendously purple here, I'm surprised that the Unicorns haven't had it printed on t-shirts. Ted listens to Tina sing and is all, "omg thats relly gud!" Tina is not mentioned in the story again.
One day, Ted comes home to find Sarah sitting in shock. Theodore has died and left the two of them everything - we don't hear how much it is, but it's supposed to be a sizable amount. Sarah tells Ted the truth and he is, of course, pissed. I knew this would happen! Excuse me while I crow. He decides to go to college just to get away from her.
1925. Ted is roommates (and BFF) (and secret gay lovers) with Harry Watson, the elder brother of Samantha and Amanda. When they're not spending their time dancing with flappers and drinking illegal booze, they're playing tennis and joining exclusive fraternities. I think that the ghost-writer hits almost every Jazz Age cliché in the book. This is the sort of thing Hemingway would have written, had he chosen to go down the Harlequin Romance route.
After a game of tennis, Harry actually says, "I've told you about my gorgeous sixteen-year-old twin sisters, Samantha and Amanda, haven't I?" Ew. Harry, please don't pimp out your jailbait sisters to your college roommate. Ted looks at a picture of Samantha and thinks that she's extremely hot. He says that he'd like to meet both twins. Then: "Harry was clearly pleased at the prospect of a liaison between his best friend and his younger sister." EWWW.
Then we get the events of the previous book from Ted's point of view. I won't bother recapping them. However, we do get to hear that Ted is "genuinely fond" of Samantha, which I guess is nice - I'd half-assumed after the last book that he thought she was just silly and boring. I still think it's stupid that neither he nor Amanda just TELLS Samantha that they're dating, though. I mean, it hurts her much more in the long run.
Then there's a pretty intense scene where Ted and Amanda make out for ages. It's meant to be all passionate and shit, but it is actually the least sexy thing I have ever read. It's a slightly racier version of a Liz/Todd scene, and it actually grosses me out a little bit. It's like reading about your grandparents making out.
Anyway. Blah blah blah. Ted gets arrested. He is released because it is "too clearly a setup", but decides to never see the Watson family again. So he grows a beard and goes to visit the tribe of his great-grandmother, Owl Feather, who was the mother of Dancing Wind. The current Chief tells him, "Your great-grandmother was going to be married to the chief, but she ran off with a white guy instead. Everyone still hates her." Only he gets his Hollywood script-writer to say it for him, so it ends up sounding a lot more spiritual and earth-loving, in the way that all Native Americans clearly are.
Outside the camp, Ted bumps into a rather forward young lady called Julia Marks. She's a wannabe reporter and is investigating a story about the US government screwing over several tribes in the nineteenth century. She comes from a filthy rich family where she's the only child, but she wants to make it as a reporter without any help from her father. She's also incredibly hot. leia_naberrie suggested to me that Julia and Ted are essentially Lois and Clark, and I love that idea. I want fanfiction about this book where they get married and then Julia is replaced by a frog-eating clone, which is what happened in The New Adventures of Superman.
Julia pines after Ted but, as with Dancing Wind and Theodore, he's still hung up on his blonde ex. Eventually Julia convinces Ted to go to Washington D.C. with her. There's some subplot about a treaty and Julia managing to expose the sins of the nineteenth-century government crap, but the ghost-writer takes so many liberties with history that I don't care. And neither should you. It's kind of sad, as "investigative reporters in the 1920s" should make for an awesome story - it slightly predates stuff like Nancy Drew and Superman and His Girl Friday, but only slightly - but the ghost-writer falls down in the execution.
Also, Ted says: "I learned a lot of Awaswan lore from my distant cousins that I can pass on to my children one day." That is just hilarious. I keep typing up snarky comments in response, but nothing can beat that on its own.
Ted tells Julia his entire sordid history, from his illegitimacy to his recent troubles with Amanda. Awesomely, Julia is like, "Wow, that must have been so tough for your mother." In D.C., they make out, but when she blurts out that she loves him, he freaks. Julia lets it go, but later in the week when he starts humming and ha-ing again, she basically says to him, "Look, I get that you had a bad relationship, but that was a while ago, and I'm not like Amanda anyway. If you think you love me, wise up. If you're just dicking me around, shut up." I love Julia. She's too good for Ted.
Anyway, Ted decides to wise up and the two of them get married and move to New York. You know, considering how much money there is on both sides, I'm surprised that the present-day Wakefields aren't richer. I mean, there's all the money Theodore Wakefield made on his farm, and Julia's family are basically the Roosevelts. Then on Alice's side, you have the enormously wealthy Watson family with their motor car empire, and Samantha the movie star. They might not be on the same scale as the Fowlers or the Patmans, but surely the Wakefields should be a little better off than just "comfortable"? Obviously people can lose money (although nothing like that is even implied in either book) and it's not exactly cheap to own a nice house in SoCal, but still. STILL.
1927. Julia and Ted have a baby! A boy, of course, called Robert. At the hospital, Ted reads a newspaper and he sees that Samantha recently died in childbirth. Ted is like, "Hay, I used to date that chick's sister," although he doesn't mention the connection to Julia. You'd have thought that he'd catch up with his old friend Harry to send his condolences, but he doesn't. Julia would've, had she known.
1937. Julia drinks lots of champagne! I knew I liked her. Apparently her office has given a party in her honour. There's a quick recap of the sort of stories she's covered, and I'm going to ignore it because it's a little too much on the Elizabeth Wakefield side of things for my liking. Although I'm sure that Julia handled her stories much more awesomely than Liz does.
She goes to Berlin to become the foreign-correspondent there, although Ted is like, "But you'll be shot by Nazis." In fact, Julia survives the Nazis and instead is killed in the Hindenburg disaster when she travels back to the US. Sucks to be her. I do find it weird, though, that neither side of the family had any family travelling on the Titanic. If nothing else, the ten-year-olds reading these books would be more likely to have heard of the Titanic disaster than the San Francisco earthquake or the Hindenburg.
1943. Robert Wakefield signs up to the navy, EVEN THOUGH HE IS ONLY SIXTEEN. Ted is mad. And sad. And he thinks his son is bad. And that this is just another fad. Although at least he's smartly-clad. I could go on like this forever! Ted tells Robert about Theodore, Ted's grandfather. For some reason they seem to think that he lived an admirable life. Yeah, except for the whole dying-alone-and-unhappy-because-he-deserted-his-pregnant-daughter thing. If Julia were around, she'd set the matter straight.
Robert gets sent to the South Pacific. I'm ashamed to admit that all my knowledge of this part of history comes from the musical South Pacific, and sadly I don't think that knowing the lyrics to Some Enchanted Evening are going to help with this recap. Let's just see how it goes, shall we? He's assigned to receive radio messages from a contact in a woman's prison on the island of Mindanao.
Cut to the contact herself, Hannah Weiss, who will one day marry Robert. Yes, she's Jewish. Yes, this means that Ned Wakefield is Jewish. The narrative says that Hannah is eighteen. That means that she's two years older than Robert! I find this inexplicably exciting. Did the twins ever date a guy who was younger than them (excluding the intern Jessica makes out with at her father's office)? There's some description of life inside the prison, and other than the Japanese guards being jerks and it being, you know, a prison, things don't seem that bad. You know, I will say for this book that it is nowhere near as overtly racist as The Wakefields of Sweet Valley. I was kind of worried when I began recapping this section of the book, as I thought it might start to read like the propaganda section of Superdickery.com. Fortunately, this is not the case!
Anyway. Hannah's friend distracts the guards while she radios Robert. She tells him that things are normal in the prison, and then the two of them have a good old chat about their personal histories. Of course they do. It's not as though Hannah has to hurry back to the other prisoners before her guards notice that she's missing or anything.
1944. Robert and Hannah are in love, even though they haven't met yet. I wish that Hannah were a hunch-backed dwarf with one leg missing, just because I'd like to know what a Wakefield would do if confronted with an ugly love-interest. Robert's friend dies when a Japanese plane kamikazes into their ship. I guess it's meant to be moving but he was only introduced four pages ago, so whatever.
1945. The Japanese surrender. Robert and Hannah meet up and make out. Robert suggests that they get married, even though he is only eighteen. I'm sorry, but that's gross. Legal, but gross. At least date for a while, kids! It's the 1940s! You can go with each other for a while without compromising Hannah's virtue! Ah, baby-boomers.
They get the captain of Robert's ship to marry them. Clearly they didn't read my recap of The Wakefields of Sweet Valley, where I specifically said that ship captains don't have the power to marry people. Not impressed, guys. Not. Impressed. Anyway, so this means that Ned Wakefield is both Jewish and illegitimate. Living in Sweet Valley, it's a good thing that he's not fat as well, otherwise he'd be better off just killing himself.
Some years later. Family gathering. Ned is a couple of months old. Apparently great-grandmother Sarah got remarried at some point and is now Sarah Wakefield-Mayne. That is such a bizarre bit of character information that when I read my notes, I had to go back to the book and check that it actually happened, and I hadn't just made something up to mess with myself. (I've done that in the past. Once time I was bored with the book I was recapping and I wrote in my notes, "Todd pushes himself in the pool." Then I left the recap for a few days and when I returned to my notes, I got really excited.)
Also, baby Ned has a cousin (from Hannah's side of the family) called Rachel. Rachel Weiss. Ned's cousin is very hot.
Early 1960s. Sweet Valley. Hank Patman is hip to Rachel's jive. He wants to tap that ass. Rachel tells him off, possibly for his bad flirting techniques. She's not quite as cool as Julia, but she'll do. Hank leaves her alone and she wanders back to her friends, who are her cousin Ned and some stoner called Seth. (I'm assuming that he's a stoner because he keeps talking about "good vibes".)
Ned name-checks the Beatles, which pretty much places the action of this story in 1964. He slams Count Basie which just, no, then heads off to the beach with Rachel and Seth in order to catch the "perfect wave". It has occurred to me that with his Jewishness, his lawyerness, his familiarity with a guy named Seth, and his love of surfing, Ned is essentially Sandy Cohen from The O.C.. This makes me feel uncomfortable, because while I love Sandy, I have always thought that Ned is lamesauce. The question is, do we want the Wakefields to adopt a stray kid from Chino?
On the way home, the kids meet a kid called Salvador, who's their age but has to work all day rather than go to school because his family are poor immigrants. They're allowed in the country to work, apparently, but that's it. Ned's Saint Elizabeth senses start a-tingling! He decides to get the student council to petition the Board of Education about this, and to do that, he needs signatures from all the council members endorsing it.
But Hank Patman, treasurer, doesn't endorse it. "And neither does Kent, Stan, or Shirley," he tells Ned smugly. Kent, Stan, and Shirley nod. I love Kent, Stan, and Shirley. They sound so generically preppy. I bet Kent secretly wants to be an artist but Hank won't let him, and Shirley works hard in school and always wears nice clothes but sometimes she just can't decide if she has a crush on Stan or Hank. And the three of them sometimes have moments where they dork out - "Oh my gosh, you guys, it's the new Freddie and the Dreamers album!" - and Hank has to scowl at them and be all, "Guys. You are harshing my cool."
Anyway. Ned is like, "Why are you such a penishead, Hank?" and Hank is like, "Because I can afford to be," and he saunters out, presumably leaving Kent, Stan, and Shirley to smile awkwardly at the other student council members.
Nothing comes of the petition and Ned is left with the revelation that sometimes rich people do shitty things. (Again, where has his grandmother Julia's family's money gone? Shouldn't he be fairly rich himself?)
1960s. USC. I'm positing that it's now 1966. I hate myself for caring. Rachel is roommates with some girl who has covered their room in tapestries. So...me, basically. (Yeah. I'm that college kid. Sorry, guys.) In wanders a hallmate of theirs, Becky Foster. Normally she's snobby and only wears tailored suits, but today she's decked out in flowing skirts and beads. She says that she's going to call herself Rainbow now because, she claims, she's one-sixteenth Native American, and is "a prism of personality with many hidden colours and talents". Okay, heh.
We get a glimpse of college Ned's gear, and it's even better than Hank Patman's bellbottoms. He's wearing a tie-dyed t-shirt, cutoffs, and his long brown hair is in a ponytail. Get a haircut, hippie! He meets Rainbow and he's instantly in love. Or at least, his penis is. I'm just sayin'.
Rainbow tells Rachel her plan: she's going to make Ned her boyfriend so that he can do her assignments for her so that she can get into law school. That's a stupid plan, made even more stupid by the fact that she's telling Ned's cousin about it. Of course Rachel tries to warn Ned, but he thinks that she's just being cynical because Rainbow comes from a wealthy family.
Ned and his pals protest some cause and get tear gassed and arrested. Rainbow is furious: she wanted homework answers, not jail time! She dumps Ned's ass and uses her family connections to get her out of jail. Ned, once again, realises that sometimes rich people do shitty things.
A few years later. Ned's final year of college. 1969? I don't know. Ned is still bitter about Rainbow but then he saves this hot blonde from drowning! It's Alice Robertson, obvs. Hank Patman runs up, of course, and Ned is all, "Ah, Hank, my old enemy, we meet again." Actually, he doesn't. He and Hank pretend like they've never met before. Oy.
Ned moons over Alice. They bond over Dylan and he asks her out, but she's all, "Sorry, dude, I'm marrying the Patman." Ned and Rachel contrive to break them up, speculating that "maybe Hank is manipulating Alice the way Becky Foster tried to manipulate Ned freshman year". Or maybe Hank's changed in the six years since they last saw him. Maybe Alice sees something in Hank that neither of them ever bothered to look for. Or maybe - and I'm just thinking out loud here - MAYBE it's none of Ned or Rachel's business who the hell Alice dates.
Ned sits alone in his frat house and plays Blowin' In The Wind ten times in a row. He is relieved that none of his brothers are around to see this display of dorkiness. Aw, I feel you, Ned. An old schoolfriend made me a superheroes-themed mix CD and when my roommates were out yesterday, I grooved out to the Ghostbusters song. Suddenly, Alice shows up! They make out! And with no quarantines to sit through, no bootlegging twin sisters, earthquakes, Nazis, or nefarious racecar drivers, the two of them have nothing to face which will break them up.
A few years later. If the twins were sixteen in 1983, this makes no sense, of course. It might work for the SVT series, though. There's some crap about how Alice's carved rose got passed down from generation to generation and how it looks exactly like the one on Ned's signet ring which has also been passed down but which I haven't bothered to mention until just now. They nearly realise the implications, but then they don't. Whatever.
Ned becomes the youngest senior partner ever in his firm. Alice gets pregnant with twins. They hope they have a girl, and they think about how "the future looked golden for the Wakefields of Sweet Valley". Oh, if only they knew!
And that's the end!
SPECIAL DVD BONUS FEATURES: At the beginning of this book (and the other Saga book as well, actually), there's a family tree, which is a nice touch. Although the tree for The Wakefields of Sweet Valley was fairly boring, we get a few more details about some of the characters in this family tree, which aren't mentioned in the book. For example! Theodore Wakefield's mother is the Lady Sarah Quinlan, his father is the sixteenth Earl of Wakefield, and his brother is James, the fifteenth Viscount Leslie!
END OF SPECIAL DVD BONUS FEATURES.