sweet valley confidential ten years later

Elizabeth was the caregiver, the maternal figure, the eternal martyr, the responsible one, and Jessica was the caretaker, the naughty kid, the sexy kid, the one who always asks for and gets what she wants. Elizabeth has always been the good twin, and Jessica the bad one.

Back in California, Todd and Jessica also feel horrible, but not as horrible as Elizabeth, since they openly acknowledge they aren’t as good of people as Elizabeth, and because they have each other and are boinking all the time.įor those familiar with the earlier books, these plot developments aren’t that surprising. Devastated, Elizabeth has moved to New York, gotten a job at a plausibly shitty theater publication (the Zagats of theater reviews), and now spends all her time screening her sister’s phone calls and feeling betrayed and wretched. Elizabeth has discovered that Jessica and Elizabeth’s fiancé, Todd, are in love. The novel begins eight months after the twins have had a huge falling-out. In the new books, the references have been updated - the girls listen to Beyoncé and talk about Perez Hilton and sometimes cry after their orgasms - but the drama remains the same. While the babysitters babysat, and the box-car children lived in a box car, the twins and their peers dealt with date rape, bulimia, cancer, car accidents, and drama. The Sweet Valley High series was, in the pre– Gossip Girl era, the most risqué tween series on the market. Sweet Valley Confidential is a shlocky nostalgia fest Trojan-horsing a downer perspective on what it means to be stuck forever and always with the immutable parts of your personality.

Alas (and as if it needed saying), never changing from the person you were in middle school is actually a fairly dark turn of events. That Elizabeth and Jessica are always themselves - alternately good and not-so-good - would seem to be a big selling point of Sweet Valley Confidential, the ten-years-later follow-up to the Sweet Valley High series, since most people who will be reading it will be doing so out of a sense of nostalgia, and the twins should be as they were. Some people never change, and the blonde and beautiful Wakefield twins, the protagonists of Francine Pascal’s long-running Sweet Valley franchise, have always been two of them.

Sweet valley confidential ten years later