Greetings From the Unicorner: A Sweet Valley Nostalgia Post


Recently, I've posted a couple of Sweet Valley themed posts here, and a few more over on Instagram, and I've been blown away by the response. Obviously, the books were huge in their day, and I've always felt a bit nostalgic for them in later years, but I never realised just how many Sweet Valley fans out there feel the same way. Consequently, I've decided to start a semi regular feature that shines a little spotlight on all things Sweet Valley. And while I'm going to make an effort to include all four main series (Sweet Valley High, Sweet Valley Twins, Sweet Valley Kids and Sweet Valley University,) and give at least some time to the spin-offs, as the name suggests, I will mostly be focusing on Sweet Valley Twins and its spin-offs, The Unicorn Club, Team Sweet Valley and Sweet Valley Jr High. 

So ... Sweet Valley Twins. The series launched by Bantam (a part of Random House,) on July 1 1986, a little over three years after the debut of Sweet Valley High. Like Sweet Valley High, the whole thing was created, and overseen, by Francine Pascal, but the stories were written by a team of ghostwriters while the novels named the author as Jamie Suzanne. The Sweet Valley Twins series also featured Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield and a number of popular characters from Sweet Valley High but with a twist--this was a prequel series. The Wakefield twins were twelve years old and had just entered the sixth grade at Sweet Valley Middle school. The twins are slowly beginning to come into their own. The first novel in the series, Best Friends, depicts the pair as they stop wearing identical clothes (predictably, Jessica is keen on the latest fashions, while Elizabeth is more of tomboy,) move into their own bedrooms, and expend their social circles independently of one another. While Elizabeth starts working at the student newspaper and befriends various nerds, tomboys and lame ducks, Jessica joins the Unicorns, an exclusive clique of mean girls. The Unicorns would become such an important part of the series that the club would eventually get their own spin off series.

Once the twins gained some newfound independence at the end of book one, the rest of the series would focus on the many misadventures of the Wakefield twins, and those of their friends. The series had a light, gossipy tone that often relied on shock value. Although the series ran with the occasional serious or dramatic story--take for example the time Elizabeth's friend Sarah Thomas was left to fend for herself after being abandoned by a stepparent--most of the stories were lightweight, and clearly designed to provide the target audience with a bit of entertainment. Take for example the book where Lila lip syncs in a music video and is then forced to come clean when she wins a competition and has to perform live, or the time Jessica makes a voodoo doll of her brother. If rival publisher Scholastic was providing children with sound literary nutrition with books published under their Apple imprint, then you had to look at Sweet Valley Twins as being a kind of dessert that was high in taste and low in nutrition. And it also had the good fortune to be one of the first serials for pre-teen girls on the market, beating it's biggest rival, The Baby-Sitters Club by a matter of weeks. Fortunately, many fans had room in their hearts--and their pockets--for both series along with a number of other notable series that ran during the same era, including The Fabulous Five, The Saddle Club, Pen Pals and Girl Talk. 

In 1998 Sweet Valley Twins and its longest running spin-off The Unicorn Club wound up when the Sweet Valley books took a turn in a new direction to make way for a more diverse cast and serious storylines. Sweet Valley Jr High was intended to be a modern and hip series for the new millennium. Although it had some success, the series wound up after thirty novels, and was outlived only by one other preteen series--The Saddle Club. 

Although the Sweet Valley brand has seen various revivals since it finished in the early 2000s, with the first six Sweet Valley High novels rewritten and rereleased in 2008, the release of Sweet Valley Confidential (featuring the Wakefield twins in their late 20s and early 30s,) a SVH graphic novel and never ending rumours of a SVH movie, Sweet Valley Twins has always been politely left alone by its creator ... well, for now anyway.

Over coming weeks, I look forward to sharing more Sweet Valley themed posts on a regular basis under the heading Greetings From the Unicorner. Let me know if there are any Sweet Valley topics you think I should cover in the comments below.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean...
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu...
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A...
Read more