Sweet Valley Diaries

Super Thriller #2: ON THE RUN w/guest reader Nick Riley! [Podcast]

Is the new boy a ladykiller, or a girl-murderer?

SURPRISE! Just to keep things spicy, we're returning to the Super Thriller series, where the Wakefield twins are still slaving away (literally!) at the News. Murders are on the rise, and all the new kids are from Ohio. Superfriend Nick Riley is Marissa's guest, and together they marvel at Elizabeth's illicit new crush, Jessica's annoying new bestie, and the impressive neighborliness of Sweet Valley citizens.

Marissa's weekly newsletter, Metaforia

Sweet Valley High Subreddit (go post about SVD there!)

Trailer for The Living Daylights

Book #45: FAMILY SECRETS

THEY'RE MULTIPLYING

See No Evil...never before has one phrase simultaneously served as the rear cover headline, the main character's flaw, and the costume that she wears to the Big Dance. Guest reader (and former Sweet Valley High reader!) Shey Lyn Zanotti joins Marissa to dissect all the ways that long-lost (and heretofore forgotten) Wakefield cousin Kelly Bates turns a blind eye to the evils around her. And for once we're not talking about Jessica.

I Was a Teenage Wereskunk

Book #31: TAKING SIDES w/Tim Redmond [Podcast - Season 4 Premiere]

With a name like Jeffrey French, what teen girl could resist?

SEASON 4 PREMIERE!

The podcast is still here! Unfortunately so is Jeffrey French. Or, wait...is Jeffrey French actually kind of a catch? Marissa comes to terms with her raging case of First Romantic Coupling Loyalty Syndrome (FRCLS) while guest reader Tim Redmond is more concerned about what Mr. Collins is getting up to. Its Jess & Lila vs Liz and Enid but the real hero is a fearless 15-year-old booklover named cousin Jenny. Also, the "dance of the month" is a canned food auction.

Welcome back, everybody.

 

Original blog post is here.

Extra Drama #26: JESSI AND THE STONEYBROOK PARADE [Podcast Bonus Ep]

Your host checked the spelling of every BSC name and location used in the titles and descriptions for this episode; yes, she'd spelled them all correctly the first time. #fullElizabeth

What do you get when you put the Baby-Sitters Club girls in a Sweet Valley world? Well if this bonus episode's best guess is correct, you get Janine Kishi and Shannon Kilbourne executing a computer plant heist alongside Kristy and Stacey. And that's in ADDITION to the big parade!

Obviously, Jack and Tanner from the BSCC Podcast are back.

OMG BONUS! Special Christmas Episode with My Dad!

👍🎄

 

Extra Drama #11: Two GOOD Two BE Two

Are modern day teens woke enough to laugh at Suzanne Devlin? Were 12-year-old readers in the '80s indoctrinated into the grand tradition of victim-blaming and rape culture? Does Jessica Wakefield know what sex is? Marissa and guests William J. Stribling and Sinead Persaud answer none of these hard-hitting questions in this bonus episode. Instead, we stand in awe of the highly problematic, highly entertaining volume that is SVH #11.

Sweet Valley Diaries #11: TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE

It's the premiere of Season 2 of Sweet Valley Diaries! Let's celebrate by shipping Jessica to New York and getting beloved teacher Roger Collins fired for unspecified sex crimes!

Don't panic, everyone. Marissa and her guests, William J. Stribling and Sinead Persaud (of Shipwrecked Comedy!) are here to hold your hand until this nightmare blows over.

Welcome back to Sweet Valley.

My original recap of book 11 is here.

45. Family Secrets

What's the secret that's hurting Kelly Bates?

It was only a dream, she told herself sternly, willing herself to forget it all. It wasn't real. It was only a dream
- p. 92

Dear Diaries,

Oh, how I’ve missed you. I could go on at length about my move to California and my adventures in screenwriting (a personal tale of transformation that’s part Jessica, part Elizabeth). But suffice it to say: Now I have a master’s degree and am, at last, adequately qualified to rehash 30-year-old teen pulp novels for your reading pleasure.

 

Family Secrets probably started with the idea that if twins are fun, triplets are even funner - so why not introduce a new character, a relative who looks just like Liz and Jess? From this harmless premise blossoms a novel that, like so many Sweet Valley High volumes, is part schoolgirl romp, part chilling psychodrama.

 

The new character taking center stage is Kelly Bates, a cousin from Mom's side of the family who possesses those flawless size-six genes/jeans for which the Wakefield girls are so famous. Kelly is visiting from Tucson, temporarily staying with the Wakefields because her mother (who divorced Kelly’s father for murky, secret reasons) is getting remarried, and Kelly needs some time to “adjust to the idea.” The futility of sending a teenager to a neighboring state so she can come to terms with an incipient stepfather aside, Elizabeth, Jessica, and Kelly are thrilled to be reunited. They immediately start scheming up ways to shock their fellow students via Kelly’s surprise arrival and stunning resemblance to the twins. They’ll all go to school in the same outfit (“It’s kind of dumb, but it’s pretty funny, too, don’t you think?” says Jessica on page 15)! But the twins are a little weirded out by the way Kelly gushes over her absentee father at every opportunity, almost always at the expense of her single mother (Aunt Laura, Alice Wakefield’s sister). Kelly even plans to move in with Daddy Dearest as soon as he gets back from a business trip to France. But from what the Wakefields know of this Mr. Bates guy, they fear that Kelly’s putting him up on a pedestal of lies (my word choice).

 

"He lives near Sweet Valley, but for some reason my mother won't let me come out here. She's so mean! I miss my dad so much. But he'll be here next weekend for my birthday," she added with a glowing smile. "And he'll probably bring me a huge bunch of helium balloons or take me up in a glider or something. He's always doing these really off-the-wall things! I never know what to expect."

 

 - Kelly raves about her father, p. 55 (spoiler alert: it doesn't go down like that)

 

At school, everyone welcomes Kelly with open arms (how could they not, given her blonde-haired, blue-eyed family pedigree), but no welcome is as warm as Kirk Anderson’s. Jessica, Elizabeth, and pretty much everyone else warn Kelly against giving “Kirk the Jerk” so much as a single chance, but she swears they just don’t know him like she’s come to know him after a few moments in his sexy presence. She looks past his constant lateness (he always has a good excuse!) and his regular fraternization with his ex-girlfriend, Marci Kaplan (“she really needed a friend,” he tells Kelly when he ignores her all night to talk to Marci), even throwing over über-eligible bachelor Nicholas Morrow as her date for the big costume party so Kirk can take her instead.

 

Oh yeah, did I mention the big costume party?

 

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: how many damn dances can one school year contain? The answer - less than 200, more than 100 - seems to come from a realm untouched by the laws of space and time. But I digress. One of the schoolgirliest parts of Family Secrets details the conception, design, and construction of a three-person group costume for a big party at the country club. The girls decide to go as monkeys; if you ever wanted to dress as a monkey, Chapter 10 of this book doubles as an instructional costume-making guide. Specifically, they’ll be portraying See-No-Evil, Hear-No-Evil, and Speak-No-Evil. Jessica refuses to be Speak-No-Evil, not for the obvious reason (that she’s a hateful bitch) but because the she can’t bear the idea of keeping her big mouth shut for long enough to make an entrance at the party. They decide that Jessica will be Hear-No-Evil, Elizabeth (obviously) will be Speak-No-Evil, and Kelly will make her Sweet Valley Party debut as See-No-Evil.

 

GET IT???!?? 🙈🙉🙊

 

Kelly’s see-no-evil tendencies are the meat of the aforementioned psycho-drama element of Family Secrets. The "family secrets" in question seem to be secret even from Kelly herself, who is haunted throughout the novel (and presumably throughout her life) by a nightmare that she always forgets as soon as she wakes up from it. It's a nightmare that involves yelling, dish throwing, and hiding under the table. What could this nightmare mean?

 

After the dance, Kirk takes Kelly out to Miller's Point ("Jessica had told her all about Miller's Point: it was Sweet Valley High's premier make-out spot"), tries to get her to "share a beer" with him, and then tries to get a little under-the-leotard action.

 

I call this "I forgot your birthday; does that turn you on?" p.128

Kelly is psyched for making out with Kirk, whom she still sees as her dream man even after all his asshattery. But she doesn't want to split his nasty trunk-warm six pack, and she certainly doesn't want to round third base at their first trip to the Point. Kirk is not pleased. He actually says the words "You're not afraid are you? A big girl like you?" After a few more attempts at sweet talk ("I've taken you out a few times, I think it's time you start showing some appreciation," and finally "It's time to grow up, Kelly. Or are you just a tease?") she finally demands that he take her home. She even kicks him (if she hadn't, I was gonna).

 

Kirk responds by throwing an empty bottle into the distance. The sound of breaking glass freaks Kelly's beans and not in a good way. When she yells at him to stop, he only throws more bottles and the cacophony of crashing glass against stone sends Kelly into a full on panic attack.  "The dam in her mind had finally broken," our author offers in a particularly dramatic flourish. She stumbles down the road, screaming and crying. Kirk has no fucking clue what's going on. In his shittiest move to date, he drives away, leaving Kelly stranded in the side of the road crying "Daddy! No! Stop it! Mommy!" She realizes that her nightmare was a memory. A memory of that terrifying night when she was a little girl and her parents fought and her dad threw dishes. 

 

Personally, I think Kirk's rapiness and his comfort with leaving a crying, raving girl by the side of the road are far more terrifying than any distant memory of shattered china. But my parents never so much as yelled at each other in my presence growing up, so what the hell do I know? I was relieved when Kelly was safely returned to the Wakefields. She and her mom reunite and reconcile, Kelly having realized that she'd spent most of her life being a bitch to the woman who'd been trying to protect her from her "off-the-wall" father's temper. As an added bonus, Kelly leaves Sweet Valley and returns to Tucson, hopefully forever. 

 

I'd like to think that some preteen girls out there read this book and were comforted in some way by Kelly's plight. Maybe they felt less alone. Maybe they felt like their parents and lives weren't so traumatic after all. Or maybe they simply realized that the boys they had crushes on were as bad as all their friends said. Maybe some of you were those girls. Kelly Bates waltzed into your life, had a bad dream, dressed like a monkey, got pawed at by a mean boy, recovered a repressed memory, and waltzed back out again, leaving you – and us all – changed for the better. 

 

Just another week in Sweet Valley. 

 

It's good to be back. 

Super Thriller 1: Double Jeopardy

 

Just then, the man stopped to hoist the load up, as if to get a better grip. Part of the green blanket fell back as he shifted the weight, and Jessica felt her heart–almost literally–stand still. A woman’s arm was clearly visible, hanging limply out from underneath the blanket. – p. 60 If you remember the later years of the Sweet Valley High series — or even if you've ever perused the list of book titles — you know that, at some point, things in Sweet Valley get nuts. Instead of semi-annual kidnappings and occasional deaths, these later books offer non-stop action, murderers, the infamous evil twins, and these Fear-Street-style plotlines sometimes span several volumes. Looking back, it's hard to pinpoint a single book that marks this shift into Crazytown. One candidate is Double Jeopardy, the first Sweet Valley "Super Thriller." This first Thriller occurs during Sweet Valley's "Impossible Summer," which is what I like to call the time during all summer-edition SVH books that is somehow both before AND after the girls' junior year. Liz has already met Jeffrey (who's away as a counselor at a summer camp), but somehow everyone's going to go right back to junior year as soon as this volume's over. So, other than existing within a rift in the space/time continuum, what's so thrilling about this book? It still features a boy-crazy Jessica, precocious bordering on sociopathic. Elizabeth is still focused and annoyingly levelheaded. But this time, there's a murderer.  The mere presence of a murderer isn't thrilling enough for you? Wait, there's more! The murderer has killed the girlfriend of one of Steven Wakefield's buddies, Adam, who happens to be staying with the Wakefields for the summer. He then put the body in the trunk of Adam's car, so everyone thinks Adam's a murderer! The one person in Sweet Valley who knows the truth is Jessica: she actually saw the murderer carrying his victim's dead body through a parking lot. But no one believes Jessica's story, because she's been lying her ass off to impress some boy, a reporter for the local paper no less! AND the murderer knows Jessica saw him, so he's probably going to come after her, too! That thrilling enough for ya? Jessica has to do all she can to convince the police that Adam's innocent, and that there's a real killer on the loose. As I mentioned earlier, some pathological lying on Jessica's part is causing something of a roadblock. Here are the primary lies she tells at the book's outset: 1. She tells the hot Sweet Valley Times reporter that there was foul play in a recent fire at the Dairi Burger. Assuring him that there's something to this story, they go check it out. The owner is totally baffled, as it was a very straightforward grease fire.  2. She tells the same reporter that her neighbor is a murderer. For some reason, he writes a story about it and turns it in to his editor. He nearly gets fired for irresponsible journalism.  3. Because she thinks relationships are boring, she want Liz to forget about Jeffrey and fall in love with Adam. She writes a love letter to Jessica, pretending it's from Adam. In it, "he" professes his displeasure with his girlfriend. This causes a bit of a snafu when Adam's girlfriend is suddenly dead, and Liz feels she has no choice but to turn in her evidence against him — namely, the letter she believes he wrote to her. Oops.  Damn, Jess! That's a lot of lying, even for you! But she's able to gradually convince them she's in earnest about the whole murderer thing. Primarily she does this by exhibiting an air of hysteria and terror. After all, now the murderer is probably after HER., the one person Jessica actually cares about.  I won't tell you how it all ends up. Suffice it to say, everybody dies. Just kidding. Suffice it to say, nobody dies. Except Adam's girlfriend. She's still dead.

43. Hard Choices

Will Enid's life ever be the same?

It occurred to Enid that although she and her mother were bending over backward to be nice, her grandmother wasn’t even trying to meet them halfway. She was picky, demanding, crotchety…      - p. 103  Do you remember the first entry ever written here in the Diaries? It began, "As an introduction, Double Love sets one thing straight: Jessica Wakefield is a bitch." Well, as a book, Hard Choices sets another thing straight: Enid's grandma is a bitch. I realize that's a pretty harsh description to assign to an old lady, but this book is clearly trying to prove little else. I mean, why else make this elderly woman, Mrs. Langevin, alias Nana, the catalyst for all of the problems in the book? She's breaking up Enid and her out-of town boyfriend Hugh (who I'd totally forgotten about), she won't let Enid or her mother (who has a sexy name: Adele) go anywhere without giving them a hard time about it, and she's keeping Enid from being involved in this week's B-Story. She sucks. But let me back up a little bit. At the end of #42, we knew how thrilled Enid was that her grandmother would be moving in with her and her mother. Nana had been living alone in Chicago since her husband died, and Enid was sure that her grandmother would be much happier in Sweet Valley with the Rollins gals, and why not? Alone in a ghosty old house here in Chicago (it's sleeting here now), or with caring family in sunny California? Seems like a no brainer. (I may or may be bitter because of that whole winter thing.) The beginning of Hard Choices finds us on the cusp of Nana's arrival. As soon as Nana gets out of the car after being picked up at the airport, Enid can tell something's wrong; grandma seems so...old! Enid's memories of Nana were of someone a little less frail. And way less plaintiff. This woman constantly mentions that she "doesn't want to be a bother" and yet manages to bother everyone at every turn. She doesn't feel comfortable driving in strange town, but she doesn't try to work her grocery shopping or senior center activities around that of Enid and her mom. Enid makes tea for her once, and now Nana expect it every day. She even convinces Enid that her mom's boyfriend is a dick, and to then convince Adele that Enid's boyfriend is no good. Of course, all of this is frustrating to the reader as well as the characters. It's clear early on that grandma needs a stern talking to, but the younger women just can't help but treat her with constant (and increasingly resentful) deference. Poor Adele actually gets proposed to by her boyfriend, Richard, but can't bring herself to say use because things with her mother are so "complicated!"  Enid has a similar type of problem. Her boyfriend Hugh goes to nearby Big Mesa, and the two have been having trouble finding time to spend together.  Enid is really excited when he invites her on this group camping trip, as it will be an extended period of togetherness on neutral ground. Mrs. Rollins, however, has been soured on Hugh by suspicious talk from Nana, and decides at the last minute that Enid can't go on the trip! She can't even get the message to Hugh before he arrives to pick her up, and he is, of course, pissed. Enid is, too, but she can’t really do anything about it. As if things weren’t bad enough, Enid has been totally unavailable to work on this movie project that Elizabeth cooked (B Story) up because she’s constantly keeping her grandmother company. This is making Liz et al (but mostly Liz) rather worried about Enid, but Enid’s keeping any ill feelings toward Nana to herself, for the most part. That is, until Nana pulls some serious shenanigans.  Despite not really being a part of the movie project, Enid is still looking forward to making things up to Hugh by attending the film’s premiere (at the Wakefields’ house) with him. Meanwhile, Adele is trying to make things right with her own boyfriend by attending a special awards dinner with him. Do you smell a problem yet? Well, Adele has actually foreseen the problem of leaving grandma alone for the evening (it’s not that she can’t fend for herself, it’s just that she doesn’t want to) and called a friend to stop by and hang out with grams. But Nana protests! “Don’t bother sending a stranger over here” she says. Adele says fine, and cancels, and after doing so, Nana drops the bombshell: “You’ll have to stay home now, Adele. I can’t be here alone. I might get sick.”  (p. 130) Why, at this point, doesn’t Adele say “that’s bullshit, Mom. You’re a grown woman, and you knew we had plans. Your choice was to have my friend come over and stay with you OR to be alone. You made that choice a minute ago and now you’re out of options” ? WHY?! I suppose it’s because such a reaction would have ended the book a chapter or two too early. Instead, Adele says “I’m sorry Enid, this is the last time” and rushed off to her date. Hugh arrives shortly after and is furious that Enid has broken yet another date. He storms off, and now Enid is furious with her obviously scheming grandmother and yells at her for being such a jerk. She even tells her she hates her! Then she, too storms out and sneaks into the Wakefields’ living room for the end of the movie. But she can only fume for a while before worrying that her unkind words have done some irreparable harm to Nana. She darts back home before Liz can stop her. When Enid gets home, she finds her grandmother in fine spirits. She’s baking, in fact. The two make up, and then Hugh stops by to apologize for getting so angry. Enid’s mom is shocked to come home and find them happily munching away around the dining room table, but she rolls with it. And Nana announces that she’s sorry she was acting so strangely, that she was feeling sorry for her poor old widow self, and that she is now ready to face life again...back in Chicago. She’s leaving, just as things started to get not-awful.  All in all, this book was kind of a place-holder. Like, “We need to write about something this month, but we can’t have another kidnapping just yet.” And that’s okay, because I needed something tame to prepare myself for the insanity of Sweet Valley Confidential, which I promise to write about very soon. Perhaps it won’t surprise you to learn that Mrs. Langevin, a.k.a. Nana, did NOT make an appearance in that volume, so get your fill of conniving old lady now while you still can, people. It’s all sex and confusing relationships next time.