Relaunching a Book Series, You Didn’t Technically Write
Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield are identical twins, with blue-green eyes the exact color of the Pacific Ocean, sun-kissed blonde hair, and until the advent of vanity-sizing were perfect size 6’s. They then became perfect size 4’s. They are also the stars of the Sweet Valley franchise, which consists of approximately 700 books from the 80s to the early 00s and four seasons of a 90’s dramedy all of which take place in an idyllic Southern California town.
You might think writing this many books would require a lot of stimulants or Danielle Steele-level productivity, but it mostly required Francine Pascal to oversee a team of ghostwriters from her chateau in the south of France. Over the years, charming details of who actually wrote the books has trickled out. A future English professor! A professional writer! A straight man!
The books themselves were amazing. Elizabeth is the good twin. She is either an aspiring journalist, novelist, or activist who likes to read and solve mysteries. Jessica isn’t supposed to be the bad twin, or not exactly. She’s a fun-loving party girl, a boy-crazy cheerleader, the mischievous scamp. Unfortunately, either the ghost writers or Francine Pascal struggled to draw the line between making Jessica fun and irresponsible, or an outright sociopath.
In the first Sweet Valley book ever (Sweet Valley High #1 Double Love), Jessica likes Todd, Todd likes Elizabeth, so Jessica pretends Todd tried to force himself on her. She later learns a valuable lesson (don’t do that) when her friends pay her back by tossing her in a pool!
Reading the original books today is incredibly jarring. While the spin-off series that cover the twins in elementary and middle school could probably be released today as is, the early Sweet Valley High would immediately be canceled. Even if Twitter didn’t exist, these books would somehow be canceled.
The first problem is Jessica, one of the two main characters. Over the course of the flagship series, she drives a social outcast to attempt suicide, drugs her sister and lets her stand trial for drunk driving, and attempts to steal the boyfriends of most of the female characters.
The second problem is everything else. The books are quite short and try to cover multiple plots which means crude characterizations and bizarrely fast plot resolution. Post Harry Potter, even children’s books can be long and meandering. That’s not how teen fiction worked in the 80s. 180 pages is long for a Sweet Valley book. But beyond the speed of resolution, the way plots are resolved would not squeak by today’s editors.
In the fourth book published in 1983, Robin Wilson wants to join the high school sorority run by Jessica but is fat. Here’s how the ghost writer emphasizes the point.
Robin plopped down on the sofa, rummaged around in her purse for something, and finally came up with a large chocolate bar. She unwrapped it and hungrily started munching.
“You’re really lucky, Liz, having a terrific sister like Jessica.” The chocolate bar was disappearing fast.
“That’s me, all right, lucky Liz,” she replied dryly, hypnotized by Robin’s rhythmic chewing.
“Robin, doesn’t eating like that make you”—don’t say “fat,” she warned herself—“break out?”
“Oh, no,” said Robin, licking her sticky fingers. “I never get zits, just pounds. But I just wasn’t meant to be slim like you and Jessica. It’s got something to do with my bones—or is it my metabolism? Anyway, it’s just my sad fate.”
Elizabeth looked at Robin dubiously. She was convinced Robin’s heaviness was due to the way she ate— especially if this was typical.
The dangers of being fat or gaining weight is a recurring motif in the Sweet Valley Universe. (See for instance Sweet Valley Twins #1 and #117). In Sweet Valley University, Elizabeth’s roommate supports the white supremacist secret society terrorizing town- but her real evil is revealed when she manipulates Elizabeth into over-eating to the point where she and Jessica are no longer identical! If these books were written now, Robin would reconcile herself to her fatness and boldly denounce her haters. But in the 80s, Robin responded with aerobics.
Robin was like a machine on the track. She looked strong, almost athletic. And, as always these days, she stared straight ahead, blotting out everything else. She ran relentlessly, and it occurred to Elizabeth that perhaps she was running toward something, something only she could see.
And also dieting.
Robin’s plate, usually heaped with french fries and double burgers, now held only lettuce leaves, two tomato slices, and a hard-boiled egg. Elizabeth watched her silently, and when Robin got up to walk away , she noticed it for certain. On the track in bulky sweat clothes it wasn’t obvious. But now, even in a tent dress, it was: Robin Wilson was losing weight.
I don’t think a YA writer would write that today. They might write a willowy thin heroine but if they had a fat character, they’d keep them fat. For instance, Meg Cabot of Princess Diaries fame recently wrote books called Size 12 Is Not Fat and Size 14 Is Not Fat Either. (The protagonist is not fat in those books as you can probably guess.)
In any case, Robin is vindicated by losing weight and winning a beauty pageant.
Such plots are typical of the first fifty or Sweet Valley High books. Sometimes serious issues are raised- suicide, sexual assault, false accusation of sexual assault, leukemia, cocaine overdoses, injury- but they are always quickly resolved and nobody seems to take them seriously.
Something must have happened to Francine Pascal or the publisher though, because around the fiftieth book, the books suddenly turn into after school specials. There are strict Asian parents, eating disorders, and steroids. The book series even revisits attempted date rape and this time it is taken seriously by all the characters. Amy’s True Love (Sweet Valley High #75) even has a character come out as gay, which was kind of noteworthy.
Honestly though, I think these books would have somehow elicited even more outrage. Robin Wilson, who used to be fat, stars in The Perfect Girl (Sweet Valley High #74). Still thin and now a cheerleader, Robin’s insecurity about her boyfriend, George’s new hobby (flying airplanes) and his new friend, Vicky, leads to an eating disorder.
"Do these carrots have butter on them?" Robin asked suspiciously.
"Margarine, yes," her mother replied. "The way I always make them."
Robin shook her head. "I can't eat them. Sorry, Mom."
Robin examined the chicken carefully, picking at it with her knife and fork. The skin was golden brown and crisp, but Robin knew it was mostly fat. She wouldn't touch that. An intense frown of concentration creased her forehead as she segregated the food into different areas on her plate. When she had finished, nearly everything was on the "don't eat" side.
"Aren't you hungry, Robin?" Mrs. Wilson asked in surprise. "You're usually famished by dinnertime."
Robin winced. Famished was just another word for greedy. It was definitely time to cut back on her food intake.
"I'm on a diet," Robin explained as she handed her glass of milk to Troy. He took it without comment.
"A diet, dear?" Mrs. Wilson frowned. "You look just fine to me."
Robin let out a small gasp of exasperation. "That's what you used to say when I was fat, Mom. No matter how much of a pudge I was, you always said I looked just fine."
"But you did," Mrs. Wilson insisted.
"Are you saying you like me fat?" Robin asked in shock. She stared at her mother with growing resentment. "Do you actually want me to get fat again?
That (except the margarine) could be written today. It’s the recovery that would draw outrage. Robin continues to starve herself and lands in the hospital. But then Vicky tells her she has nothing to fear, that Vicky could never compete with Robin because she’s addicted to marijuana.
"You know what that did to me?" Vicky asked. "I was the baby of the family, and it was as if I were some kind of time bomb. As soon as I was old enough, my family would split up. It would be my fault. I didn't want that to happen. So you know what I decided to do?"
Robin was curious, in spite of herself. She looked at Vicky and shook her head slightly. "What?"
"I thought that maybe I just wouldn't grow up. If I stayed the baby, my parents would have to stay together. And so I started doing the most crazy, stupid, immature stuff. I started to smoke cigarettes, I stole booze from the liquor cabinet, I smoked pot. And I kept telling myself it was all just for one reason—to keep the family together. I didn't like what I was doing. In fact, after a while, I was pretty miserable."
"So?" Robin felt a growing sense of amazement at hearing Vicky's story. On the surface, Vicky seemed so totally pulled together. But below the surface, there was still a frightened girl whose voice shook when she relived her painful memories.
Vicky stood up and began to pace nervously. "So, I got hooked. I turned into a real dopehead. Instead of pretending to get into trouble, I really did. I was completely messed up. I thought I was controlling my parents' lives for the better, but all I was doing was losing control of my own. Trying to keep my family together almost killed me."
After that, Robin decides to start eating food again.
But whatever social pretensions Sweet Valley may have been developing, they suddenly fly out the window for the final third of the series as it abruptly transitions into serialized soap opera arcs. This is the high point of the series. The number of twin switches accelerates, there’s some attempt at character development and continuity, and Jessica is even semi-redeemed.
The redemption of Jessica may seem implausible but it’s largely accomplished by introducing an endless stream of actual villains and allowing Jessica to occasionally risk her life to save others.
The magnum opus of Sweet Valley High was the Evil Twin arc.
The Evil Twin
Margo is an abused foster child. She is perfect size 6. But she has ominous gray eyes and dark hair. She doesn’t live in Sweet Valley.
Meanwhile in Sweet Valley, Jessica and Elizabeth both want to be prom queen. While Jessica focuses on getting the perfect dress, Elizabeth decides to turn the jungle-themed prom into a conservation fund-raiser. Elizabeth goes to the prom with her boyfriend, Todd, and Jessica takes Sam, a dirt bike rider and total hunk.
Thanks to Elizabeth’s tireless activism on behalf of the environment, she seems like the front-runner for prom queen so Jessica spikes her punch with vodka. Elizabeth, in a fit of drunken magnanimity, withdraws from the prom queen race, goes for a drive with Sam, crashes her Jeep and kills him!
Elizabeth goes on trial for vehicular manslaughter, and Margo sees her beautiful face almost identical to Margo’s own in the newspaper. Margo goes on a killing spree as she heads to the West Coast in hopes of killing Elizabeth and stealing her life for her own.
The best part of this plotline is that after Margo gets blonde hair she practices imitating the twins since she’s planning on replacing Elizabeth. Whenever she pretends to be Jessica she mostly gets away with it (they’re both bad!) but whenever she tries to be Elizabeth, people think she’s Jessica playing a joke. Jessica and others will end up thwarting Margo’s plan at great personal risk, which makes Jessica look okay compared to a serial killer.
(A year later it will turn out Margo is still on the loose and was separated from her own identical, evil twin at birth and they’ll team up to try and kill both of the Wakefield sisters and take both of their spots but it doesn’t live up to the magic of the original).
The original Sweet Valley High series would launch multiple spin-offs ranging from the iconic Sweet Valley Twins (middle school), the serviceable Sweet Valley University (college), and two ill-fated attempts at more realistic storylines (Sweet Valley High Senior Year and Sweet Valley Junior High). The last spin-off ended its run in 2003.
The Re-Release
After Gossip Girl became a TV show and made lots of money, there was an attempt to cash in on Sweet Valley High. The first few books were re-released and updated. The twins shrank from size 6 to size 4, Elizabeth worked for the school blog instead of the school newspaper, and occasionally characters would glance at cell phones to remind us it was now set in the present day. It wasn’t very successful and only the first several were ever updated. More ambitiously, Francine Pascal would release Sweet Valley Confidential and the Sweet Life, chronicling the lives of the twins at ages 27 and 30 respectively.
The New Stories
Whenever a big IP is revived (Star Wars) or adapted (Marvel) there’s always a lot of speculation about whether the focus will be on pleasing obsessive fans or attracting a new audience.
But with a property like Sweet Valley, the only selling point was going to be nostalgia. Sweet Valley Confidential was not going to be a surprise hit, it was not going to be big around the world, and it was not going to get an ironic Zoomer fan base. It was wholly and completely a nostalgia play. Which made the decision to have negative fan service extremely baffling.
If I were Francine Pascal, the reboot would have featured a wedding, the twins as bridesmaids, and twin switches every other chapter. I also think Jessica would have used Face ID to secretly read her sister’s texts. There would be lots of unnecessary references to past plot lines to make the readers feel at home.
(Jessica gazed across the balcony towards the Pacific Ocean, its blue-green color in the morning sun precisely mirroring the color of her eyes. She sighed, as she moved her gaze to the tea cup in front of her, tucking a strand of blonde hair behind her ears. British tea always reminded her of that time in high school when she interned at a London newspaper and was almost killed by a werewolf. But at least at the time she and her sister had still been best friends. But now that had changed…)
Instead, Francine Pascal (or an uncredited ghost writer) decided to have a book filled with reverse fan service. Honestly, I think Francine Pascal just didn’t really know what was in most of the Sweet Valley books. Because while Sweet Valley Confidential is the canonical successor of Sweet Valley High, it sure as hell wasn’t the spiritual successor.
All of the most recognizable characters from the past series appear, but Pascal appears to have plucked their names and biographies from a Watch Mojo list of the ten most popular characters and thrown them into the new book at random. Elizabeth is now randomly best friends with rich snob, Bruce Patman (a recurring antagonist/antihero of the original series) and the twins’ brother is now gay and partnered to Aaron Dallas, Jessica’s middle school boyfriend. Strangely, Pascal tells us that Jessica barely knew Aaron.
Structurally, the book is a mess. The main drama is that Jessica stole Elizabeth’s long-time boyfriend, Todd, but that’s already happened before the book opens. The book is also filled with what can only be called fake flashbacks. Rather than excerpts from past books, there are rewritten passages from the first Sweet Valley Book ever, Double Love. And in first person, rather than the conventional third-person perspective of the book.
Pascal also decides to retcon the whole motive of the first book- Jessica’s unrequited crush on Todd by converting it to Jessica wanting to compete with Elizabeth for male attention.
If the selling point is nostalgia, why not just go whole hog? Did Pascal think the original ghost writer let her down? Why pretend to revisit the original?
At least there’s a few things, Pascal gets right. She remembers the main point of the twins is that they’re really, really hot.
Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield appeared interchangeable if you considered only their faces.
And what faces they were.
Gorgeous. Absolutely amazing. The kind you couldn’t stop looking at. Their eyes were shades of aqua that danced in the light like shards of precious stones, oval and fringed with thick, light brown lashes long enough to cast a shadow on their cheeks. Their silky blond hair, the cascading kind fell just below their shoulders. And to complete the perfection, their rosy lips looked as if they were penciled on. There wasn’t a thing wrong with their figures, either. It was as if billions of possibilities all fell together perfectly.
Twice.
She also manages to throw in a tiny bit of continuity here and there. Robin Wilson is back again and she “looked terrific having gained back only a tiny bit of that lost weight from her high school years, which was amazing since now she was a successful caterer and restaurant critic.” But Pascal mostly fails at continuity nods or even writing a plot where things happen. The majority of the book consists the characters having flashbacks of everything that happened between the old books and the new books. The epilogue is addressed directly to old Sweet Valley fans and tries to reminds us of beloved fan favorite characters. But the summaries of these side characters is often wrong. Pascal appears to misremember the backstories that she ordered her ghost writers to pen.
Overall, it sucks.
In Conclusion
The CW now says its going to launch a Sweet Valley High TV series. I doubt it. A few years back, Diablo Cody claimed she was making a Sweet Valley movie which never happened.
And if it did happen it would be bad. It wouldn’t be ludicrous enough to really be Sweet Valley, even Riverdale can’t live up to peak Sweet Valley. The characters couldn’t be written today and still be the same.
In 1995, there was The Brady Bunch Movie. The joke of the whole thing was that they were the same people, overwhelmingly wholesome, living in the cynical and jaded 90s. It was pretty funny. But could it work for Sweet Valley? I don’t think so today. Any straightforward adaptation of Sweet Valley would be reviled. You could try to make Jessica be funny and awful like the cast of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but the essence of Sweet Valley is that her antics were presented as escapist, self-indulgent, teenage hijinks, not as a truly terrible person getting away with everything. In the world of Sweet Valley High, getting thrown in the pool or losing a beauty pageant was all that moral justice required to teach you a lesson.
Some things ought to stay dead. Some magic only belongs to the 80s and the 90s.
These are the Sweet Valley books that should be remembered and reread.
1. Dear Sister (Sweet Valley High #7)
2. Double Love (Sweet Valley High #1)
3. Romeo and 2 Juliets (Sweet Valley Twins #84)
4. Boyfriends for Everyone (The Unicorn Club #17)
5. The Pom-Pom Wars (Sweet Valley High #113
6. Slam Book Fever (Sweet Valley High #48)
7. Lila’s Secret Valentine (Sweet Valley Twins Super Edition #5)
8. Jessica Against Bruce (Sweet Valley High #86)
9. The Evil Twin (Sweet Valley High #100)
10. The Unicorns Go Hawaiian (Sweet Valley Twins Super Edition #4)
