* Photo credit to The Closet *
I like Jess’s sassy stance. She actually looks pretty on this cover. Bitchy, but pretty. The other girl—Andrea Slade—looks dead behind the eyes. She’ll fit right in the Sweet Valley scene.
Andrea’s just moved to Sweet Valley from New York, and Liz and Enid Rollins have swooped in to become her new best friends. (Ten bucks say we never hear of Enid and Liz being so buddy-buddy with the girl again after this book.) Andrea’s cool, witty, and laidback, but she’s so secretive about her home life. Everyone at school panics because she won’t tell them where she lives or let them pick her up,. In other words, everyone at school is an idiot and asks her ridonc questions that no teenagers would ever care about, such as, “So what does your dad do for a living?” What is this, an awkward yuppie dinner party? Here’s the convo:
Olivia [Davidson] looked thoughtfully at Andrea. “Hey I just remembered, my father told me that a new manager started at his firm this week. He didn’t say what his name was, but I just realized that he could be your father. Did he move here to take a new job at Phillips Corporation?”
“Uh, no,” Andrea said. Elizabeth thought she looked a little embarrassed. “He—he’s actually self-employed.”
“You’re kidding. Is he a writer?” Olivia asked eagerly.
“No.” Andrea fidgeted. “He’s just…you know, a regular self-employed businessman.” Everyone looked expectantly at her. “You know. He’s an ordinary investor.”
Now Winston [Egbert] looked interested. “Does he have an office here, or does he work at home?”
Jesus Christ, lay off, douche bags! Why would any sixteen-year-old decide to make conversation about a parent’s home office?
Anyway, Jess is in love with Jamie Peters, a rock ‘n’ roll star who sings a song called “Doing It All for You.” BWA @ that title. Even more asinine are the lyrics: “Whatever you say, whatever you think is true, whatever it is, girl, I’m doing it all for you.” What the hell does any of that even mean? Anyway, Jess, Lila Fowler, and Amy Sutton get together to obsess over him, which is a teenage move that I can totally relate to. (My poison was Hanson.) They swarm around a rag called Rock and Roll and read about Jamie Peterss’ plans to move from the East Coast to California. GEE I WONDER WHERE HE’LL MOVE TO. Ugh, and furthermore, I can’t get over how shitty the writing is in Rock and Roll—it’s pretending to be Rolling Stone but makes Tiger Beat look like investigative journalism. It’s like they’re having twelve-year-olds writing editorials. Observe the “article”:
Rock and Roll interviewers had a hard time getting to know the real Jamie Peters, the private side of the very public star. We talked for hours about his new album, Pride, and he was happy to answer all our questions about his music—where he’s been, where he’s heading. But when it came time to delve deeper, we could sense his mood change.
We asked him about the first song on his new album, “Little Girl.” Was there a special woman in his life?
We could tell the question disturbed him. [LOL.] Jamie Peters is famous for keeping his personal life under wraps. All we were able to glean from him were the most basic facts. He married his childhood sweetheart, a beautiful singer named Karen Ross, with whom he cut an album the year they were married…. All he’d say was that yes, there’s a “special girl” in his life. And all Rock and Roll magazine can say is, whoever she is, she sure is lucky!
If anyone can’t see where this excuse for a plot is going and what Andrea’s secret is, he/she just might be too dumb to read even Sweet Valley High.
Lila sees Jamie Peters hanging around downtown Sweet Valley and stalks him to his mansion, where she brings Jess, Amy, and Cara Walker, and they see him with none other than Andrea Slade! They all think she’s pulling a Penny Lane and shacking up with him—scandal!—so of course this news gets spread all over school, and everyone wants to be Andrea’s friend all of a sudden, and she’s all “Wah! When will people like me for me?”
Andrea meets Nicholas Morrow, a.k.a. He Who Shall Go by Two Names, and they go sailing, and it’s love at first date, as per usual. But Nicholas Morrow is super offended when Andrea won’t let him pick her up at her house, and things get worse when Lila and Jess tell Nicholas Morrow that Andrea is Jamie Peters’s live-in girlfriend. He stands Andrea up for dinner and tells her via a note left with the restaurant’s hostess saying that she’s a fake and a phony, etc. Then Jamie Peters calls up Liz, tells her that he’s Andrea’s dad and Andrea’s gone missing. I like how instead of calling the police, all adults immediately phone The Elizabeth Wakefield Hotline. Still, it’s appropriate, considering she does keep tabs on everyone.
Liz, Enid, and Nicholas Morrow find Andrea at the marina, being all wistful, and they all go back to Andrea’s estate to meet Jamie Peters and have a good laugh. Jamie Peters (another person who must go by two names) promises Andrea that they’ll stay in Sweet Valley foreva and eva now that he’s switching to a movie career, and life is just perfect. It turns out that JP’s jam “Doing It All for You” is about Andrea—okay, when a song about your kid is thought by everyone to be a sexy love jam, it’s time to consider some heavy rewrites.
In a teensy subplot, Lila decides to become a musician! Jess and Amy laugh their asses off about her taking up the marimba (“Want to hear me play the opening notes to ‘Jesu, Son of Man’s Desiring’?”) and decides after about a week of playing that she’s good enough to reveal her talent to Jamie Peters, who thinks she’s so awesomely bad that he uses his connections to get her cast in a movie as a crappy marimba player. A career’s gotta start somewhere.
Other Notes:
- Jamie Peters calls his daughter “babe.” How rock star of him.
- The descriptions of Jamie Peters’s photos are making me guffaw: “On this page, Jamie was in his recording studio in New York, a pair of sunglasses pushed back on his head. A tight white T-shirt was rolled up at the sleeves to reveal well-defined arm muscles. One hand lay confidently on his electric guitar, and he faced the camera with an expression of smoldering defiance.” Smoldering defiance! I can’t go on.
- Tee @ Andrea Slade having such an obvious DILF. Eat it, Ned.
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