DEAR SISTER tried our nerves and bruised our spirits, but we lived to tell the tale. Listen to both the main episode and the bonus episode via the links below!
In this tearful conclusion to the Sweet Valley High series, Elizabeth stays in a coma forever…PSYCH! But seriously, has Elizabeth awoken only to find that the events of DEAR SISTER are a fate worse than death? Actress Alex Jennings and Marissa give a wide-eyed play-by-play to a book that reads like the unholy lovechild of Freaky Friday and General Hospital.
Heads up: Due to forces beyond our control, this episode has a higher f-bomb count. Plan accordingly.
We’ve read about fictional 1980s highschoolers, but what is it like to play one on TV?! Alex Jennings, who plays Carla on ABC’s The Goldbergs, is uniquely equipped to answer this question. But mostly we just talk about dry shampoo, what it would be like if Carla had a twin, and “enjoying the release of crying,” whatever that means.
The 2006 blog post about this book is over here.
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“Watch it, Annie Whitman! Jessica’s out to get you!”
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The 2018 podcast episode about this tremendous book is right this way. The extra exclamation points in this page’s heading speak to the undying love I have for this stupid, stupid book. If you’d like some details on the role this book played in the creation of the Sweet Valley Diaries, read More About the Diaries. I will say this: this was the book that reminded me, or perhaps revealed to me in a way I couldn’t understand when I was younger, the intriguing, absurd jewel that is Sweet Valley. What I found so interesting isn’t that hard to sum up: The Sweet Valley High series is this perfect, precise snapshot of every fabled high school stereotype. The faults of these characters and the problems inherent in their presence in a book series for teens are so enticing! Also, hilarious. And let’s face it, I wouldn’t spend these long hours reading, thinking about, and writing on the Sweet Valley HIgh books if I wasn’t supremely entertained by them. And this insane piece of fiction is, so far, the supremest of them all.
Annie, who desperately needs some attention, has worked hard on learning all the cheerleaders’ moves, and is actually something of a gymnast. Like once-fat Robin from Books 3 and 4, she won’t feel special until she becomes popular. Where Robin had her heart set on Pi Beta Alpha, the high school sorority in the sky, cheerleading is Annie’s chosen path. Robin and Annie differ in another way: Robin found solace in food, but Annie has tried the fleeting love of many, many boys to cure her feelings of loneliness and ineptitude. Not so unbelievable so far, huh? Though her talent is certainly not in question, the hitch in Annie’s plan is obvious: co-captain of the cheerleading squad is none other than Miss Jessica Wakefield (btw, a little epilogue from the whole Robin Wilson story: she is the other co-captain. No joke.). This, my friends, is where the story gets good, but it is also where reality and the Sweet Valley Universe part ways to a degree. Jessica can see that Annie’s talented, but doesn’t want her on the squad because “if we take her, everyone will think we’re just like her.” In fact,when Annie proves herself to be far and away the most talented auditioner, Jessica tries to convince a majority of the cheerleaders that “the image and the very integrity of the cheerleading squad are in terrible danger!” Nevermind the gaping holes in her logic, you can bet this plan is successful. She’s Jessica Wakefield, after all. Because I first read this book before reading Books 1-9, I did not see one of the biggest flaws in Queen Jessica’s anti-slut decree: Jessica herself takes pride in the fact that she’s dated virtually every eligible male at Sweet Valley High. Sure, she doesn’t have sex with them, but half the school – the bourgeoisie – probably assumes she does. When I was in high school, and even more so today, sluttier girls were viewed with the same combination of disgust and envy that popular girls were. It made sense that the two groups often overlapped. But back in Sweet Valley, this is apparently not the case, though the only clear difference between Jessica and “Easy Annie” is that the latter is a little less discriminating in her tastes. This is what Jessica and, to a lesser extent, the whole school hold against her, and what keeps her off the cheerleading squad. Returning to the plot, we now reach the crossroads in our story where someone learns a lesson. Lately, the lesson has been learned by the person who was trying too hard to join the popular aristocracy. But this time, it’s Jessica who is forced to change, in a turn of events that far surpasses Elizabeth’s coma on the scale of absurdity. Annie tries to kill herself. After overdosing on her crazy mother’s prescription drugs, Annie goes into a coma. “Ha ha!” Annie must have thought, “Jessica will be sorry when I’m dead.” Sure enough, upon hearing the doctor say Annie might not make it because “she seems to have no will to live,” Jessica realizes that she actually caused this with her evil powers. So Jessica decides that she has the power to save Annie, too. She does the unthinkable: she expands the cheerleading squad to eight, and tells the incapacitated Annie that there was a mistake. She was supposed to be on the squad all along. “Somewhere deep inside her pool of fright and loneliness, Annie Whitman had found an anchor. Something held her, kept her from drifting beyond the horizon of infinity. Desperately she had clung to that anchor and struggled to listen to a faint voice that reached her as if through the depths of the ocean. Through the long night, Jessica’s hand had kept her from slipping into the total blackness. Jessica’s voice had comforted her.” So there you have it, folks. Jessica has saved yet another soul from a coma that she played a major role in causing. Way to go, Jess! The only thing that kept this ending from sounding totally blasphemous was the emphasis throughout the book that was put on Annie’s vastly superior performance as a cheerleader. There was no question that she deserved a spot on the squad, so we could honestly feel that Jessica was to blame, and forget, if only a little, what a huge overreaction this was on Annie’s part. HUGE. I will, however, admit it felt pretty good to finally hear Jessica call herself “selfish, spoiled, impossible, vindictive...stuck-up and cruel.” Somehow, though, I think she’ll get over it. Soon. Oh, well. There’s always the next coma.
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“Can Jessica face life without Elizabeth?”
When it comes to plot devices, it’s hard to top a nice, convenient coma. Soap operas have been using them for decades as a great way to get characters out of the way, nullify relationships, and generally spice things up. But the juiciest plots often stem from a sort of coma-induced “rebirth”, when the sufferer awakes as a completely different person. It may seem farfetched, but it makes for an interesting change of pace when you’re trying to fend off a 7th-Book Slump.
All of the Sweet Valley novels have ended with a kind of lead-up ending to pave the way for the following book. As I mentioned in the previous installment, Book 6’s cliffhanger was as dramatic as ever, even if the ultimate question, “Will Liz live or die?!?!!” wasn’t exactly fooling anyone. Happily (?) the drama does not end with Elizabeth’s coma, which she pointlessly remains in for a WHOLE CHAPTER of Dear Sister, until Jess can miraculously rouse her with a rare, honest confessional. No, no, the story only begins there. Right away, something is mysteriously different about Liz.
Suddenly, Liz cares about her appearance first and foremost, borrowing makeup from Jessica so she can look her best for Todd, whom she still rebukes for complementing her. Much to my dismay, “new Liz” finds that Todd leaves a bad taste in her mouth. Todd, of course, assumes that she is angry with him for almost killing her with his death-trap Yamaha. Now, you and I both know that the real Liz would blame the drunken driver that hit them, not Todd, for her coma. But this new Liz doesn’t even care about the coma – she is just tired of Todd. She wants to play the field! Dammit, for such a perfect couple, Todd and Elizabeth sure can’t manage to stay together for more than 40 pages. It doesn’t help matters that Elizabeth begins flirting with as many guys as possible during her waking hours and immediately uses her recent coma as an excuse to rest when it’s time to do some work. It’s almost as if...oh my God. OH MY GOD. ELIZABETH HAS TURNED INTO JESSICA!!
We are angry, very angry. We hate Jessica, and now there are two Jessicas and NO Elizabeths to balance them out. But, faced with the grim specter of, well, her own awful self, Jessica (the real one) begins to act more responsible, not just begrudging Liz all the fun she’s having, but resenting having to do the work of two people herself, cooking, cleaning, and occasionally saving face for her “Dear Sister.” In a kind of backwards way, this book confirms the suspicion I’ve had from the get go:, that the Wakefield twins are, if not Good VS. Evil, at least Good hanging out with Evil.
Of course, for the sake of the series, things have to return to some form of status quo by the end. In Book 7 it occurs in grand form, with possibly the greatest scene yet for Sweet Valley. In her post-coma, Jessicafied dementia, Liz entices no less a villain than Bruce Patman to whisk her away from the crowd to his beach house, where the two do some heavy petting in various rooms before winding up in the master bedroom. Think about this for a second. How amazing would it be if good-girl Elizabeth actually had sex with her mortal enemy, Bruce Patman, and woke up the next morning, her old Liz self, totally unaware of where she was or what she had done there? So amazing. And if Sweet Valley were a real, televised soap opera, that’s exactly what would have happened. Instead, while Bruce is fetching some wine from the kitchen, Liz falls and hits her head on a nightstand and suddenly has no idea where she is or what she is doing. No sex. But it’s still awesome when Bruce Patman walks in, raring to go, and Liz reacts with befuddled disgust. She actually has to bite him and threaten blackmail to get out of there, and she runs straight into Todd’s arms. Ahh, Todd. That’s much better. The end.
Seriously. The book ends there, no wrap up, no nothing. I follow suit.
In search of the 2018 podcast episode about this book? It's here.
“Are Elizabeth and Todd headed for disaster?”
Elizabeth and Todd are the perfect couple. They love each other intensely, they passionately want each other to succeed, and each one loathes the thought of disappointing the other. If you ignore the pesky facts that Todd despises his girlfriend’s twin sister and Elizabeth loses her cool at the mere presence of another girl in Todd’s line of sight, you have yourself a relationship so mature that its occurrence between two high-schoolers is laughable. But I am willing to accept it, because I am a hopeless romantic type, and I need a solid, passionate, trusting relationship in my teen melodramas to keep me from tearing my hair out.
What I’m trying to say is, I am obsessed with Todd and Elizabeth.
For me, this has some historical precedence. I was always rooting for Dawson and Joey, and I stopped watching 90210 when Dylan and Brenda broke up (I was way too young to be watching that show! But no one could stop me…), and I didn’t think it was that weird that Cory and Topanga got married in college. Even my Barbie doll story line had a solid, romantic couple at its core – Courtney and Kevin (What? You’re telling me your Barbies didn’t have a story line?). I think this penchant for committed romances is what allowed me to get caught up in Book 6, Dangerous Love. It’s all about Todd and Elizabeth, and we finally see Elizabeth facing a somewhat believable dilemma.
Todd has saved up for quite sometime to buy the motorcycle of his dreams, but Elizabeth has trouble sharing his excitement, as her parents forbade her and Jess from riding on motorcycles long ago, after a cousin was killed in an accident. Elizabeth, curiously enough, doesn’t bother discussing the matter with her parents. But she also keeps this information from Todd for quite some time, stupidly making excuses not to ride. It’s clear that she doesn’t want to hurt his feelings. He bought her a cute crash helmet! Come on!
Of course, eventually Elizabeth does take a ride, egged on by – what? Can you guess? – that’s right, Fear of Losing Him. When other girls start getting rides from Todd while Liz is stuck driving the Fiat home alone, Liz gradually cracks, breaking the rules in the name of love or jealousy (and also because Jessica has left her at the dance without a ride. Oops.). Her punishment is swift and terrible: she ends up in a coma. That’s right, upon making her first ever mistake, Liz is in an ironic car accident with the very jerk Todd had just agreed to sell his bike to. It’s all just too much.
Still not enough, however, for our author. This book ends with the most asinine cliffhanger in history: Will Elizabeth live or die?? Tune in next time to find out!
Ditto.
(Looking for the 2018 podcast episode about this book? Click here to motor at high speed into a new era.)
