A few years back, my wife and I stopped into a grocery store to pick up a couple things on the way home. Near the doors was a small used-books-by-donation stand. A collection of well-thumbed editions of Needful Things, 1980s-vintage airport novels, and a little coin box. $1 per book, proceeds to charity. On the honour system.
We were panning the shelves for second-hand book gold when my wife pulled out a slim, white-spined paperback. In a circle on the cover, two teenaged girls with identical facial features struck melodramatic poses. The title was The New Jessica.
My wife had read these avidly 20 years earlier, and this one, she informed me, was completely bananas. I dropped a loonie in the box and set off on a bizarre adventure into the world of 1980s YA extruded book product.
When I was a young reader, I was pretty omnivorous. I discovered science fiction and fantasy when I was about nine or ten, but if a book was in range of my greedy little mitts, I would probably at least try it, if there wasn’t anything with rayguns closer to hand. I didn’t reject all “girly” books – but Sweet Valley High was a bridge too far. The series was a pastel wilderness into which I dared not venture. I had never picked one up, passing them by for Choose Your Own Adventure and the library’s collection of Heinlein juveniles.
Now my wife and I ventured into The New Jessica, book 32 in the main Sweet Valley High series. So I was introduced to the Wakefield Twins™, who have blonde hair, blue-green eyes, “perfect size six figures” and skin that is both peaches-and-cream and tanned, somehow. But they aren’t alike on the inside (as every book makes sure to inform you) as Elizabeth is reliable, bookish, and sensible (read: dull, judgmental, and surprisingly prone to cheating on her boyfriend) while Jessica is a fun-loving, free spirited cheerleader (read: she is an actual sociopath). Juniors at Sweet Valley High in the town of Sweet Valley, they inhabit an aspirational universe of clear skin, handsome boys, dating, hijinks, and adventure.
And it’s all deeply weird.
The plot of The New Jessica proceeds thusly: Jessica is bored and decides to change her look; she dyes her hair black and changes her makeup so she now looks “exotic.” Elizabeth, thrown into an existential crisis because her identical twin is now NO LONGER IDENTICAL, spends much of the book crying and bewailing her fate. She thinks her boyfriend Jeffrey is more into Jessica’s “new look” than into her; angst and more tears ensue. A subplot about a chance at a modelling job looms large, and Jessica, fame-hungry, auditions, only to be told what they REALLY want for this fashion show is someone with a NATURAL LOOK, and the agency gets way too excited over Elizabeth, and Jessica washes the dye out of her hair and goes back to status quo as an identical twin, and they’re both in the fashion show. The end.
Long story short, my wife found her giant box of old Sweet Valley High books in her parents’ attic, and over the past approximately five or six years, we’ve read about 90 of them aloud to one another, with frequent snark interruptions.
The New Jessica is a perfect introduction, if you want to embark on a quixotic quest to become an unofficial expert on ’80s adolescent teen melodrama. It doesn’t have the high points of many other books (car/boat/plane crashes, hostage takings, kidnappings, escaped homicidal maniacs, gangsters, a fatal drug overdose, psychosomatic paralysis, brain-injury induced personality changes, a desert island, buried treasure, two separate teen princes looking for romance, serial killers, flash floods, a murderous doppelganger of the twins, a doppelganger of the doppelganger, and a hot teen vampire) but it’s pretty representative of the core elements of the series.
These elements are:
Physical perfection – everyone is pretty, or handsome, or gorgeous
Crying. So much crying. I cannot emphasize how much crying there is
Relentless heteronormativity
Anxiety about reputation maintenance that verges on psychotic
Refusing to communicate for absolutely no good reason
Ain’t no trauma you can’t resolve with a party!
Jessica being impulsive/cruel/actively criminal and facing no real repercussions
Elizabeth being a judgmental wet blanket
And the writing quality is… generally bad. Sometimes excruciatingly so. The bulk of the writing was done by a horde of hired freelancers, mostly college students. The skill level is variable (there are two or three that have decent prose and some nice characterization) but tends towards the cruddy end of the scale.
What kept us reading was the weirdness of the, for lack of a better term, world building. Sweet Valley is both a paradise and the most dangerous town since Cabot Cove. The teenagers live in a nether-world where dating and relationships and reputation are all-consuming, but sex is emphatically NOT being had, by anyone, ever. Boys wear slacks and blazers and ties on dates like it’s 1959, while girls wear garish ’80s fashions like purple jumpsuits.
So what have I actually learned from these books?
Well… it turns out that not all YA series are created equal.
About 40-odd books into our odyssey, I suggested we check out some other old YA books.
Why not the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books? I’d read a ton of the blue-spined Hardy Boys hardcovers as a kid, and they seemed ripe for the same sort of snarky fun we were having with Sweet Valley. We picked up a couple of each at the used book store.
It was a major tactical error.
They were sooooooooo boring.
Frank and Joe and Nancy were moved around like action figures. Pull the string on the back and they said “Look, a CLUE!” Their friends and family showed up to provide suspiciously plot-relevant help or exposition. It was approximately as interesting to us as adults as listening to someone describe a game of RISK.
We didn’t finish them. Gave up. Threw in the towel.
And went back to reading Sweet Valley High books.
What was it that made these books – which are objectively terrible – still readable, at least with a healthy salting of sarcasm?
As far as I can tell, it comes down to giving the characters rudimentary emotional lives and drives. They want things. They act on those desires, and that gets them into trouble.
Frank and Joe want to solve mysteries because… well, they’re in a mystery, what do you want them to do?
Is this incredibly basic advice? Good god, yes. “Make your characters want things” is drilled into most young writers from their first high school writing class, in college, in writing workshops and groups and through skywriting, probably.
The reason they give this advice is because it’s so easy, especially for those of us writing idea-heavy fiction, to lose sight of that.
And a lot of my early (unpublished, thank god) fiction was written along the same lines. “Look, my character is doing interesting things, in an interesting setting! I worked it out so well, it’s so cool! Why isn’t this story working?!?”
Those stories didn’t work because I was pushing the characters through the story, rather than letting them hack their own path, driven by their own desires. They were doing interesting stuff, sure, but WHY? If they don’t care what they’re doing, who else is going to care?
But until I read Sweet Valley High, I didn’t know how effective that really was. There’s a reason these books sold millions of copies, spawned an empire, a TV show, and so many spin offs it would take another paragraph to list them all. The characters are often terrible – self-centred, narcissistic, condescending, privileged, and entitled. They should, one and all, be packed into a rocket and shot into the sun.
But they act. Impulsively, stupidly, in defiance of common sense, the law, and often physics. Is Jessica going to turn down a chance at a wacky scheme to get famous? Of course not! Is Elizabeth going to stop herself from meddling in the lives of her classmates? No freakin’ way!
So yes, I’m still reading them. I now have firm opinions about minor characters with names like Enid Rollins and Ken Matthews and John Pfeiffer (Booooo! Die in a fire John Pfeiffer!) I kinda hate these books. And I kinda love them, too. Who saw that coming from an honour-system used book rack?
If you once read Sweet Valley (or still do) I highly recommend the Double Love podcast. Two Irish podcasters tear into each book in the main series one after another, and they’re up into the 50s now. Terrible ’80s outfits are catalogued and awful decisions dissected. It’s pretty great.
Also quite good is Gabrielle Moss’s Paperback Crush, a coffee table book about how the serious, issues-driven YA books of the 1960s and ’70s transitioned into the pastel-and-hijinks books of the 1980s and ’90s. Loads of reproductions of covers and an almost exhaustive listing of the various series that were featured at Scholastic book fairs.
I was going to skip Self Promotion Corner this week, but then I got the galleys for my next story. I am therefore legally obligated to let you know that The Acheulean Gift, the story whose title I have trouble spelling even though I chose it myself, is out fairly soon (spring?) from Analog Science Fiction & Fact! It’s about adolescence, family, summer camp, and the aerodynamic potential of hand-shaped stone axes. God, I love science fiction.
Next newsletter, flash fiction: Time Travelling Teenage Dirtbags.
You have been warned.