Sweet Valley Diaries

Extra Drama #17: Natural and Unnatural Disasters

Alternate title: "Ned Wakefield's Bok Choy Allergy"

Marissa and guest Jeremy talk about the diverse lessons of LOVE LETTERS, from "be yourself," to "once you have a boyfriend everything will be okay," to "San Francisco is a cesspool." To top it off, Marissa reads a love letter of her own...kind of.

The construction of the Transcontinental Railroad in California

1989 Bay Area Earthquake KGO TV News Report(This is several years after LOVE LETTERS was first published, but it's both a weirdly nostalgic historical artifact and genuinely a bit frightening -- be forewarned!)

New Podcast Episode: Book 17, LOVE LETTERS

The George Glassification of Caroline Pearce...

My Dearest Caroline,

Oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken!

What had I on earth to do

With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly?

Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel

—Being—who?

 

Your fake boyfriend, that's who!

 

Maybe don't carry this particular letter around in your purse or show it to the mean girls. Probably you should just toss it.

 

xoxoxo,

Adam (& Robert Browning)

 

 

More about Elizabeth Barrett Browning

More about Robert Browning

 

Looking for the old blog post on this book? Voila!

"Sweet Valley Confidential" Part 2: The Other Things

YET ANOTHER SUPER SPOILER ALERT!!

Okay, okay. You've had a few months. Has everyone finished reading at this point? Like it or not, it's time to put your books away and get pencils out. I'm giving you a pop quiz?

1.Who sleeps with more guys in this book, Elizabeth or Jessica?

2. Which Men of Sweet Valley fall in love…with each other?

3. Which character(s) grew into reportedly despicable adults?

The answers to the above questions encompass (1) my favorite about-face in this brave new SVC world (and one I find somewhat believable); (2) the part of the book that makes me most giddy, despite the fact that it seems totally unbelievable; (3) the one thing about this book that really, truly stinks (putting aside my dismay about Jess and Todd ending up together). Let's explore.

ANSWERS:

1. Elizabeth. I haven't pored over every page of the book looking for sex scenes (I swear!) but by my count, Jessica only gets busy with two guys in SVC: Todd (past and present), and the rich guy she ditches in France. Elizabeth, on the other hand, has (to start) chapter one's infamous “crying orgasm” stranger. This event doesn’t occur during the book, strictly speaking, but I think we can agree that linear timelines and Sweet Valley are mortal enemies, and that’s true in this new book even more than in the never-ending junior year of the SVH series. Then there’s Todd of course (mentioned in the past-tense), the saucy playwright Will Connolly, and, ultimately, Bruce. At least two of those pairings are reactionary, Elizabeth acting out against her goody-goody, sweet, and trusting past, the past that wounded her so deeply.
   
   Jessica, meanwhile, thinks of seducing others (her co-worker, most notably), but decides to put that out of her mind in favor of love. Now, that doesn’t sound much like Jessica. But when one is trying to put one’s life together after a failed relationship (or, in Jessica’s case, after MANY failed-by-design relationships), one often tries to make a drastic change, lest you make the same mistake twice. Especially at 27. Even though I was a bit disappointed that Jessica didn’t decide to seduce anyone in this book, you know, just for old times’ sake, I have to say that this particular turnabout in the lives of the twins makes sense to me.
2. Steven Wakefield and Aaron Dallas. Let me say that again, in case any of you are reading this instead of the actual book. Steven Wakefield and Aaron Dallas fall in love in this book. With each other. It’s kind of awesome, in a shocked-and-surprised-but-oh-what-the-heck sort of way. Of course, in real life, young men (and women) discover their homosexuality post-high-school, and most of us probably have at least one or two high-school peers whom we friended on Facebook only to find that, against expectations, they’d come out.
   
   But seriously, now. Aaron Dallas, the soccer star with the anger management problem, and Steven Wakefield, the handsome brother who dated a high school girl (in the book, he and Cara are married, you’ll recall) while he was in college? These are not the prime suspects for gaydom in the Sweet Valley Universe. Who would I have picked, you ask? Easy:
   
   Nicholas Morrow (infamous ascot wearer) and Tom McKay (though he had several girlfriends, it was once suggested that Jessica “turned him off the female sex forever”). Wouldn’t they have made a lovely couple? Sure, it wouldn’t have been particularly helpful to the story, but it would have been more believable. Or perhaps Steven could have fallen for one of them instead of Aaron. As one twitter follower pointed out, Steve and Nick could have adopted a daughter and named her Regina. Sweet.
3. Pretty much all of them. Enid is a bitchy doctor who Liz doesn’t even keep in touch with anymore, and she’s ashamed of her affair with mere salesperson (note sarcasm) A.J. Morgan. Lila and Ken have a disastrous and complicated marriage/divorce. Steven is keeping his homosexual affair a secret from his wife. Betsey Morgan is reportedly a drunk again. Don’t even get me started on Jessica and Todd. It used to be that only Jessica and Lila were consistently awful, and at least then it was with a fragment of soul that kept you interested. These 27-year-olds are just sort of awful.
   
   Of course, the saddest example is Winston. That he becomes rich and famous definitely fits the model, and we know that wealth corrupts. But screw believability (and ignore the fact that I’ve been ranting about it throughout this entry), this is Sweet Valley! Why does Winston have to turn bad? Moreover, why does he have to die? (Sorry, non-readers, but I did say “super spoiler alert”.) This is just the prime example of what seems like the mean theme of this book: People are jerks, and you have to learn to live with it. Rise above it if you can, but it’s inevitable. And, yeah, that might be true, but it’s not exactly the message we Adult Readers of the Sweet Valley Series have been waiting for. As pre-teens reading the SVH series, we got lessons like “Don’t be a drunk driver,” “Don’t hang out with creepy older dudes,” or “Help your friends when they get kidnapped.” Some of us could still benefit from such lessons, I’m sure. One of the reasons I hope there are more volumes in a theoretical Sweet Valley Confidential Series is because I think these characters deserve a chance to redeem themselves, and we deserve a little more from them.
   
   One more thing about Winston: As unpleasant as his storyline gets, it holds some fascinating implications. Remember how Winston and Todd grew apart after the former found out about the latter’s affair with Jessica? Well, what if that betrayal destroyed the fun-loving Winston’s faith in humanity? Success held little joy for him if two people he thought so much of could do something so hurtful to someone they loved. He could only take pleasure in joys of the flesh, so to speak, and they led him to accidental death. So, in a way, his death is Todd and Jessica’s fault. Wouldn’t that be interesting? I think so. Next book, please!

Faces I've Come to Know

If you’ve ever used a Mac, you may be familiar with iPhoto. If you are familiar with iPhoto, you may have used Faces. It is a handy tool that has become like a game for me, because I have an inner filer that I let out every once in a while (at first I typed “every once in a file,” which also would have been true). It lets you “tag” you photos, à la Facebook, so that you can easily locate a picture based on who’s in it. Very cool.

I keep photos of Sweet Valley book covers in my iPhoto library, along with other things. James Mathewuse’s cover paintings are realistic enough that it’s possible to label the characters’ faces as if they were friends of mine that I’d been snapping pics of. So I do. And I take it as a badge of true Sweet Valley pride that iPhoto now can recognize some of our favorite characters, guessing who they might be in an effort to help me label. Please enjoy the following impressive specimen.

Wow! That’s pretty impressive, iPhoto. I especially love how it guessed that the concerned girl was Elizabeth and not Jessica. It was right.

Deeper still is the biting subtext of the following labeling query:

 
See? It’s funny because it’s a word-for-word transcript of what went through my head when I first looked at the cover of this book. Now we know that the girl on the right is Johanna Porter (and so does iPhoto), but she must not be that important. I mean, it’s four books later, and she hasn’t been mentioned again. At least she warrants a tag; the program didn’t even recognize that Peter DeHaven had a face.

17. Love Letters

Is Caroline’s romance for real?

“I do have a boyfriend,” she whispered aloud...”His name is Adam and he lives in Cold Springs. And he loves me very much.” In pre-school, I was in a meaningful, long-term relationship with Sadat, who has become a sort of folkloric hero to my friends over the years. The cornerstone of our connection was that we weren't just boyfriend and girlfriend, we were friends. Though the two of us had to part ways when kindergarten rolled around, never since have I found any merit in having a boyfriend just for boyfriend's sake. This was certainly troublesome in high school, when I had lots of friends that were boys, but could never manage to fall in love with any of them. Meanwhile, kids were coupling up left and right to do God knows what up at Paradise Point! What was a single sixteen-year-old with such rigid standards to do? I had no choice. I had to invent a fictional boyfriend at a faraway high school. NOT. I never did such a thing, because that's RIDICULOUS. Also, I'd seen that Brady Bunch episode, and wanted to try my best not to pull a Jan. Caroline Pearce, on the other hand, has made herself a genuine George Glass for Book 17, and she manages to come off as crazy – certifiably INSANE – before Chapter One comes to a close (see quote above). For those legions of you who are not reading along, let me explain Caroline Pearce. There haven't been too many books in the series that haven't mentioned her, but rather than drive the plot forward, her appearance typically serves as an annoying intrusion for both the characters and the reader. She has three outstanding traits: red hair, a squeaky voice, and, above all else, a reputation as a notorious gossip. Jessica Wakefield and her crew despise Caroline (despite her membership in Pi Beta Alpha) because she's always trying so hard to hang out with them. Elizabeth isn't crazy about the girl either, because gossiping is just plain wrong. So perhaps I should add a fourth characteristic to the list of things we know about Caroline: NOBODY likes her. Call me crazy, but that didn't sound like the best kind of character to build an entire book around. But hey, it's just 150 pages among tens of thousands. And in reality (in case you haven't noticed, I use the term loosely), Love Letters is quite a turning point for poor, misguided Caroline. Because of the bizarre style of point-of-view-variable third person these books are written in, we learn as the book begins that Caroline isn't just a gossip, she's a sad, lonely gossip who feels she has no one to depend on. No one at school wants to befriend her for some reason, and she's convinced her cooler, prettier sister hates her. But she feels like things are starting to turn around for her now that she's got sweet, handsome, romantic Adam. "Maybe I'll never be as popular as the Wakefield twins or Lila Fowler," she thinks on page 2, "but I'm not going to be an outcast anymore. All that has changed now with Adam. Thanks to Adam, people are finally starting to pay attention to me." The bad news? He's a fake. Doesn't exist at all. Caroline made him up and carries letters "from him" all over school just so she has something interesting to say about herself. And people are interested. Especially, alas, Jessica Wakefield and Lila Fowler, who are more that a little bewildered by the thought of someone LOVING icky Caroline. I know what you're thinking: What does this story have to do with poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning?! Well, the answer may surprise you: a LOT. A lot to do. Elizabeth is writing a one-act play about the poets' romance for a school contest, and it features love letters Mr. Browning wrote to Miss Barrett. When Liz reads the play to her family, Jessica realizes that Browning's poems sound an awful lot like Adam's letters to Caroline. "Hmmm..." thinks the evil Jessica, and Caroline's house of cards begins to teeter. Jessica and Lila conspire to expose Caroline's suspected misdeeds with a crazy party in Adam's honor, though they're not sure if Adam's totally fake or just a plagiarizer. Caroline might be a bit mentally deficient, but she's not so far gone that she can't see Jess and Lila's party for what it is: a trap. She tries a lot of things to save face. She makes up plans for Adam, like "he has a baseball game" or "he's too poor to afford the gas to drive to Sweet Valley" (and this was 1985!). She even has the nerve to ask Elizabeth not to read her play in front of the school (a required part of the one-act competition), lest the students recognize Browning’s words as the ones Caroline’s been parading around the town with. Needless to say, Jessica and Lila don't let up, and Caroline knows that no amount of stalling can make up for the fact that Adam doesn't exist. Unsure of where to turn as the party draws nearer, Caroline confesses all to her sister, Anita. Caroline seems to think that no one cared about her until she had a boyfriend, but Anita helps her see that no one cares about her now, either. If that sounds harsh, good. It was only through such harshness that Caroline could see herself accurately. People weren't afraid to get close to her because of her lack of a boyfriend, her inherent unlikability, or her annoying voice (that's just Jessica). It was because she couldn't be trusted with a single piece of information, significant or insignificant. Anything that occurred in her line of sight could be considered fodder for the next conversation she tried to start with anyone who happened to stop near her. Hell, the entire B-Story (see sidebar) was catalyzed by Caroline's discovery of a letter that blew onto the Wakefield's lawn from the GARBAGE. Even though she "hesitated to read the letter", she did read it, and then she showed it to Jessica. I mean, come on, if you're going to steal someone's garbage and read it, you don't get on her good side by telling her about it!  Thus concludes my rendition of Anita's speech to her sister. And suddenly, a miraculous change comes over Caroline, and her heart grows three sizes, etc. She takes this new attitude around town, telling Elizabeth that she's sorry about asking her not to read the Browning play, and ultimately to "Adam's" party, where just as she's about to tell everyone the truth about Adam's non-existence, who should appear behind her but...Adam! The magic of her good deeds has brought her fantasy to life! It's a Sweet Valley Miracle! Okay, so not really, but there is a friend of Todd's from out of town who's pretending to be Adam to save Caroline's ass and teach Jessica a lesson. His name is Jeff and, surprise, surprise, he and Caroline really hit it off. That's about it. Another character learns a lesson and comes over from the dark side - excuse me, the fat/annoying/poor/slutty/unpopular side. But despite Elizabeth's major successes in the field of soul-saving, and despite her own best efforts, book after book, one character still remains as evil as ever: Jessica. How many changes of heart does this girl have to have before it sticks? Let me see...how many books are there in this series?  I'll leave the math up to you, friends.