* Photo credit to The Closet *
So that’s what the cops in Sweet Valley look like. No wonder these kids feel they need to solve crimes on their own. And in the background we see the Wakefield’s Spanish-style home that they’re always raving about. It hardly looks like the type of home the twins need to stop and admire every time they remember they live in a house, but whatever.
There are a hundred different plots going on because not one of them can carry a book on its own. Let’s break it down:
A Plot: Liz has been arrested for possibly killing Sam Woodruff on prom night and spends one night in jail with some hookers, who of course talk about how beautiful she is. Would they really put a beautiful, blond, over-privileged sixteen-year-old girl in such a situation? Anyway, Liz is charged with involuntary manslaughter and Ned tries to get her the best lawyer in town, but the lawyer must not be from Sweet Valley because he has enough balls to stand up to the Wakefields and say how they profoundly dumb they are if they think Liz is going to be acquitted based solely on her whiny “I don’t remember anything!” bullshit. The Wakefields think the lawyer is so mean because he doesn’t care about how woebegone Liz is and he says, “It’s going to be hard to convince a judge that Elizabeth is innocent when Elizabeth isn’t even sure herself” (BURN!), so Ned decides to take on his daughter’s case himself. Lame. In the meantime, Liz avoids well-meaning Enid Rollins at school because she’s so ashamed and then cries because she has no friends. Shut up, Liz.
Meanwhile, Jess is suffering in her own private hell, deliberately choosing not to think about “that silly joke” she played on Liz and Sam (“the accident obviously had had nothing to do with her”). She wants to make Liz pay for killing her boyfriend, so she phones up Todd Wilkins, who is hating life and himself for not being there for Liz, and makes him take her out. They remain stone-faced when they see a funny movie and then end the date rolling around in the sand at the beach and sobbing about how much they hate life. Worst date ever. Jess continues to call Todd and make him feel sorry for her—sorry enough to French her! Way to go, Todd, baggin’ both Wakefields, which really isn’t that hard.
B Plot: Steven Wakefield leaves school to go baby-sit his tatters of a family. In his absence, his new roommate Billie Winkler moves into his apartment without them ever meeting. And it turns out that Billie is not a dude like he assumed—it’s just a beautiful girl with a horrible name. I wonder if they’ll feel an attraction for each other.
C Plot: Lila Fowler’s mom Grace is finally returning to Sweet Valley after fourteen years to help her daughter through some troubled times, and Grace is all Lila can talk about, to the point where her douchebag friends are genuinely bored. Amy Sutton doesn’t care that Lila wants to impress her mom; she wants to talk about how poorly the Wakefield twins are doing and how sorry she feels for them! Amy’s a total downer: “One of the things Amy was most afraid of was that the wonderful Grace might take one look at Lila and wish she stayed in France.” Caroline Pearce is an ignorant tool: “What I don’t understand is why you’re so anxious to meet your mother, when everyone else wishes they could get rid of their mothers for a while.” And Jessica is just a bitch: “Jessica was finding the whole thing irritating. There were more important things in life than Lila and her mother and their favorite restaurants. There was death, for instance,” i.e., Jessica Wakefield’s problems.
Anyway, Lila meets Grace at a restaurant, and just when Grace is about to tell Lila why she ran away a decade-plus ago, along comes Pierre, Grace’s obnoxious French boyfriend who introduces himself publicly as “Grace’s lover.” He’s sort of hilarious and has more personality than Lila’s dad, that’s for sure. But everyone gets annoyed at Pierre because he’s not Sweet Valley enough and he’s ruining all the Lila-Grace bonding. Then why did Grace bring him? Idiots. Lila gets rightfully pissed when Grace ditches her in mid-John Pfeifer story in order to go tend to Pierre’s needs, and blah blah.
D Plot: Bruce Patman is so in love with Big Mesa student Pamela Robertson, but he just can’t forgive her for “going all the way” with multiple dudes, as per the rumors claim, so he becomes bipolar and spends his days crying and yelling angry advice to couples in TV commercials. However, the rumors about Pamela aren’t even true: It’s all just some vengeful B.S. brought on by her ex-boyfriend and all these other dudes whom she wouldn’t sleep with. Boring. I’d rather Bruce be in love with a girl who couldn’t keep her legs closed; that would’ve been more interesting. I want to see Bruce just have to deal with it! Pamela wants to explain her situation to Bruce, but he can’t bear to constantly defend her honor against all the horndogs so he just ignores her. I must say that even though Pamela is sort of simpering, she is smart enough to realize that Bruce should shut up because he has a rep, too, of being “Mr. Big Man with the Big Ego and No Heart.” God, that’s a long nickname.
E Plot: Nicholas Morrow is unlucky in love and just can’t understand why. After all, “he didn’t drink, gamble, drive too fast, and he loved animals.” Excuse me while I weep with boredom. So he goes on a dating show called Hunks and takes out three girls, and it just turns the spotlight on how damn dull he truly is. He inwardly shuns the first two girls he goes out with because they don’t fit the Sweet Valley personality-free standards. One of them laughs too much and wears flip flops on their date, so she’s obviously the scourge of the earth. Another he keeps calling a vampire because she wears all black, has a tattoo, and drives a motorcycle. Seriously, how sheltered are these people? But the third date is with an angel named Ann, who speaks on national television how “romantic” their date was (even though Nicholas Morrow showed up jaded and dressed like a scrub, forgot his wallet at home, got a flat, and threw up at the amusement park). So he smooches her for all the cameras to see and they live happily ever after or whatever.
F Plot: Margo locks babysitting charge Georgie Smith in closets, does her nails, and dreams of moving to California, just like pioneers in the days of yore did. She drowns Georgie in a lake once he tells her where the key to the jewelry safe was (why would a parent have told a little kid that?) and makes off with enough dough to hop a westward train. Along the way, she kills an old lady for her Sweet Valley newspaper because there’s a picture of Liz Wakefield on the front of it. As if that last sentence wasn’t as ridiculous enough, Margo can’t believe how exactly, exactly, oh so exactly identical she and Liz are! They have the same exact face! What are the odds? Pretty high, actually.
Other Notes:
- Who the fuck is this “Maria Santini” that the ghostie keeps writing about? You mean Maria SANTELLI, who’s only been mentioned in at least 30 percent of every Sweet Valley High book up to this point? Jesus Christ.
- Somehow George Fowler looks “rugged,” despite his plush lifestyle of being a computer tycoon.
- More Liz bullshit concerning Todd: “She’d only seen Todd once…at Sam’s funeral. For some reason, she hadn’t been able to make the first move toward him. When he’d move toward her, she’d turned away….Ever since then, Elizabeth had been waiting for him to phone.” This girl needs more therapy then she knows.
- Some more elaboration on Nicholas Morrow’s boringness: He goes to the biker club with Vampire Lady and orders “mineral water” and complains that it’s “small, dark, and crowded” and “so noisy he literally couldn’t hear himself think.” You’re eighteen, dude, so why are you acting like a cranky old man harboring a collection of balls that belong to the neighborhood kids? He gets pouty when he and Chronic Giggler have to go to a burger joint instead of the fancy French restaurant he wanted to go to. Nicholas Morrow, for God’s sake, have some imagination. This part did make me laugh, though:
[Chronic Giggler said,] “When you leave, they give you a balloon.”
“A balloon, huh?” They’d better give him more than a balloon. They’d better give him a tranquilizer or he’d never make it home.
- Steven thinks of his poor mother Alice and what she’s going through with the twins, and wonders, “What did she do to deserve any of this?” Um, failed to parent, perhaps? That’s my guess.
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