Readers’ Advisory: The Looniest Sweet Valley High Stories

I should like to think that I’m something of a Sweet Valley High connoisseur; I have read every single book in the series, even the super specials, super thrillers, magna editions, what have you, and then blogged about each one at MARGO RISING. I need to be proud of this great achievement; otherwise I’ll have no choice but to be profoundly embarrassed and deeply depressed.

The briefest of synopses: Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield are perfection personified in the form of sixteen-year-old twins who get into all sorts of histrionic antics. Sure, there’s boyfriend stealing. There’s back-stabbing. Of course there are which-twin-is-which?-type shenanigans. It does a fine job of glamorizing the life of teenagers for those who are too young to know the truth. (Thanks to SVH and shows like Beverly Hills, 90210, I totally thought I was going to have a zillion boyfriends and be driving them around town in my brand new cherry-red Jeep. I didn’t even get a driver’s license until I was nearly 18, let alone a car [which came along when I was 21]. And let’s not talk about the guy situation.)

However, for me, what makes SVH‘s legacy so appealing and enduring is that it’s so completely INSANE! To prove my point, I’ve combed through my snarky summaries at MARGO RISING and have selected what I feel to be the most quintessentially far-fetched story lines best representative of the good Sweet Valley name in the series. So if you’re feeling curious or nostalgic about the series and/or for being a preteen fantasizing about being a gorgeous, blond, popular teenager, and want all that served with a huge heaping pile of CRAZY, you’ve come to the right post!

Magna Edition: A Night to Remember. Compared to others in the series, this story isn’t actually all that absurd, but it does introduce us to the concept of Magic Punch—one sip is roughly the equivalent of fourteen shots. Jess and Liz both want to be crowned queen of the Jungle Prom and it ignites some real nasty bitterness between the two that culminates at the prom itself when Jess nabs a drunk prom-goer’s liquor and dumps a couple drops into her sister’s sole drink. (This just backs up my mom’s insistent warning of “Never leave your drink unattended!” which is something she started drilling in my head since my first fifth-grade dance.) Liz splits the contents of her cup with Jess’s boyfriend and they get TOTALLY WASTED. Then the two drive off together, crash the car, Jess’s boyfriend dies, and thus begins the series’s foray into churning out truly fantastical three-part story lines!

Super Thriller: “R” for Revenge. This one came out late in the series after people stopped really caring about SVH. Maybe that’s a good thing, considering this story is largely unmemorable, but it makes up for that by being completely bizarre. In short, the school’s ‘70s-obsessed librarian spends her days sitting in a beanbag chair, listening to Joan Baez records and plotting to kill the Sweet Valley High cheerleaders. (She’s traumatized for having been booted from the squad in 1976 for having a facial tic.) Then she kidnaps the Sweet Valley cheerleaders, ties them up in her basement, and lets the room flood slowly, hoping to drown them slowly to the sounds of the Doobie Brothers and Stealers Wheel. Dr. Evil should hire her, with plans like this. *Spoiler alert*: The cheerleaders make their escape when they decide to cheer their way out. This book needs to be read to be truly believed.

Magna Edition: #100 The Evil Twin. For me, this one really put SVH on the madness map. In the five books leading up to this one, foster teen Margo (for whom MARGO RISING is named!) leaves Ohio and nears Sweet Valley, accompanied by a sense of doom. She murders a bunch of people along the way, including toddlers and single mothers, but it isn’t until she reaches our hallowed California town that she finally takes it too far: she becomes so obsessed with the twins’ perfect lives that she plots to kill one of them and take over her life, Single White Female style. It’s extremely helpful and convenient to her evil plan that she looks exactly like Elizabeth and Jessica when she dons a wig and contacts. At the end, Margo gets pushed out a window at a New Year’s Eve party and Jessica sums up how we all feel: “I don’t know if I’ll ever understand it. [Margo] came all the way from Ohio to California to find [Liz]–to kill [Liz], to be [Liz]?” We have no answers, Jessica.

Magna Edition: Return of the Evil Twin! Okay, there isn’t actually an exclamation point at the end of the title but it felt appropriate to add. Just when you thought it was safe! Just when you thought introducing murderous Margo and her plan was preposterous enough! Well, that barrel bottom wasn’t scraped yet: There’s another Wakefield-twin lookalike named Nora, and as it turns out, she’s Margo’s twin! And Margo isn’t dead after all! Together they team up to take out and become both the Wakefield twins, a plan that leads to a twin getting stabbed to death and another stealing a police officer’s gun, etc. You may find it downright impossible to suspend belief for this one, but it’s a requirement if you want to get past the first chapter.

#128 Kiss of a Killer. Jessica’s vampire boyfriend turns into a crow! (I’m getting more succinct.)

Magna Editions: The Wakefields of Sweet Valley and The Wakefield Legacy: The Untold Story. Technically (and obviously) these are two stories, but their gists are so similar that it’s okay to lump them together: These books star Elizabeth and Jessica’s ancestors from both their mom and dad’s side, who come close to marrying each other about 500 times until pesky fate gets in the way. (A bunch of them die in childbirth, another blows up on the Hindenberg.) In any case, both books prove what only the most die-hard Sweet Valley fans believe: that the twin birth of Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield was a completely unavoidable act of destiny!

And now, a list of Sweet Valley High blogs that do a fantastic job of love-hating on the series: