Sweet Valley Flashbacks

Adolescent fiction must be totally different now than when I was reading it almost (eep!) two decades ago. When I dug into Ramona, the Babysitters' Club, Sweet Valley High and the like, there were no digital cameras, cord-free cell phones, Facebook or blogs. It was a different world, and our fiction reflected that.

Slambooks were like Facebook, only on paper. Mark Zuckerberg, you weren't that creative!

Nonetheless, I was oddly excited last year to hear that Sweet Valley High was being updated and re-released for a new generation. (Annoyed at the "perfect size four" change, but moving on...)


In the early 90s I was a Sweet Valley addict, reading about our favorite blonde twins, Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield, from their grade-school days, through the Unicorns club phase and all the way to college. I loved reading all their backstories and find out what happened to the twins, their friends Lila and Enid, dream guy Todd and the rest of the gang.

If you're a SV lover like me and have ever wondered what happened to the Wakefield girls after their stories ended, you're not alone. And you're in luck!

Coming in the spring of 2011:

According to People, the novel picks up with the twenty-six-year old twins estranged and living on opposite coasts: Elizabeth in NYC and Jessica in their California home town. What could have caused such a rift?

If you need a Sweet Valley fix before March, take a walk back through time by revisiting every last book on Wikipedia. A very devoted fan spent quite a bit of time putting this together, y'all.

As I scrolled through the hundreds of titles, I realized how very much money one Ms. Francine Pascal must have; I've heard she lives on the coast of France and I can see why! She took a great idea, franchised it, delegated to a troupe of ghost writers and retired. Not a bad gig! Almost 30 years after the first book was published, Jessica and Elizabeth live on.

Is anyone else excited to find out what comes next for the Wakefield sisters?