Francine Pascal's Sweet Valley High

Trip down Memory Lane #3

I devoured series such as Sweet Valley High . . . These are not respected books (whatever that means), but I found them riveting, and I still aspire to read and write books that are unputdownable.” Curtis Sittenfeld

How Did I Get Here?

I didn’t expect to return to Sweet Valley High this week. In the late 1980s, I read these books in batches; they were part of a private reading life in which adults had no involvement at all, save for the librarian who stamped them with the due date, or the bookseller who dropped them into a pink-and-white striped paper bag, like lollies. I read widely, and loved it, but these books were my treat.

In recent conversations I’ve had with writers, we’ve discussed parents paying close attention to what their tweens and teens are reading (for all kinds of reasons), the rising costs of paper, ink and printing (and, therefore, books), as well as rising word counts since our teen days.

Reading for pleasure is down in the UK, the US and Australia (where most of my subscribers are beaming in from), and the barriers to kids and teens reading are mounting: “not enough time”, “don’t see myself as a reader”, “can’t pay attention to a book”, “reading feels like hard work”, “I don’t have any books”, etc.

So for a big tangle of reasons, I retrieved a book from my vintage collection, from the series I could read standing on my head, and probably did sometimes.

Pocket Books

With dimensions of 104mm by 170mm and a spine of 1cm, this book whispers to a kid you have time and you can do this — though of course to survive in today’s bookshops you’d need a small army of them on the shelf. The edition I have was $4.50 new. The imprint page tells me that the RL (Reading Level) is 6, and the IL (Interest level) 12 and up.

The SVH series was the brainchild of Francine Pascal but these weren’t her first books. I read Pascal’s first young adult novel, Hangin’ Out With Cici (published 1977) in primary school, and rediscovered it a few years ago. It’s one of the stories I mention during school visits when I give talks about the time-slip novels I now write — I enjoy seeing kids’ wide eyes when I give them the elevator pitch: After a strange jolt on the train, teenager Victoria finds she’s travelled back to the 1940s and befriends her own mother, Cici, now the same age as her. Perhaps I was subconsciously thinking of this book when I named the mother in The Other Side of Summer and I Am Out With Lanterns “Cece”. I hadn’t thought of that til now.

Francine Pascal’s husband died when she was only in her forties. Having recently had a soap opera pitch rejected, Pascal was under pressure to come up with a new, financially viable idea. She devised the world of Sweet Valley High and quickly sold 12 books to Bantam based on outlines and a series bible. While ghostwriters did the actual writing, Pascal gave them detailed backstory for every character and outlined each plot in “acts”. She’d tell them, “Don't do anything of yours — only do what I say.” That system saw them through 20 years, 27 languages, and 150 million copies sold.

The ghostwriter of the book I chose to re-read is named as Kate William but that was a pen name for Amy Boesky. When Amy was writing for SVH she was a Harvard graduate studying 17th century British literature at Oxford; she’s now a professor at Boston University.

Let’s Get Into It

To brace you for the title I chose to read, here’s a clue:

The 80s chevron as modelled by Selleck, Brosnan and Ritchie, just some of the men responsible for moustaches.

The Sweet Valley High cover art was the work of James Mathewuse (1938-2021) who used photographs as references. Here’s the photo reference for the book I chose:

And the artwork:

And here it is, All Night Long, lined up with two other titles that we wouldn’t see advertised for 12-year-olds any more: Teacher Crush and Two-Boy Weekend.

The blurb: Elizabeth Wakefield knows her beautiful twin can handle almost any guy—most boys are no match for Jessica’s seductive charms. But Scott Daniels, Jessica’s latest love, is more of a man than a boy, much older, and much more experienced than anyone Jessica’s ever dated. When Jessica sneaks off to a college beach party with Scott, Elizabeth’s afraid of what could happen. And when her twin sister isn’t back by morning, Elizabeth’s fear turns to alarm. Where’s Jessica? Why has she stayed out all night long?

(internal preview) “I’m cold,” Jessica said. “Let’s go back to the beach.” “Don’t worry,” Scott promised huskily. “I’ll warm you up.” Suddenly he was kissing her in a way that told her he meant business. Jessica backed away. “Scott, I—” She held out an arm to ward him off, but he mistook it for an invitation.

If my mum had read this particular blurb and preview, she’d have said something like “dirty bastard” and handed it back to me. She’d have told me about situations she found herself in as a young woman. Mum’s advice back then ranged from “laugh at them” (flashers in particular) to “kick them where it hurts” (anyone who might try to grab me). I expect she worried about it more intensely than I ever understood at the time but she didn’t put her worry onto me. She didn’t think there was anything either of us could do really about “dirty bastards”, apart from telling me to “be careful”.

In my re-read I was anticipating the story to build up to this scene we’re shown in the preview, where Scott’s idea of consent is the fact that Jessica is wearing a bikini. I imagined I’d witness Jessica’s gradual, alarm-bells-ringing, mistep after mistep journey to the point of an assault, followed by her rescue and a bunch of I told you so’s over a milkshake at The Dairi Burger.

But interestingly, Jessica’s encounter with Scott the creepy college boy, although frightening, is over by the end of chapter three. Jessica sees him for what he is and reacts boldly, never losing her trademark sass. Although she spends some time during the foreshadowing of the encounter wishing she’d made different decisions, when it comes to placing blame afterwards, she puts it squarely on creepy Scott and her twin sister Elizabeth for not trying harder to stop her from going.

While blaming her sister takes mental gymnastics special to Jessica, I wish that not blaming herself had been a positive spin rather than a character failing. Psychologically there doesn’t seem to be any damage at all to Jessica, and the rest of the story instead belongs to morally upright Elizabeth. It’s Elizabeth who has to deal with the consequences of Jessica being out “all night long” (Jessica can’t get back from the party because Scott is too drunk to drive her, and is an ass). We hardly hear from Jessica again, though we know she gets home safe and sound.

This is the cue for Elizabeth to accept, reluctantly, the classic twin plot: covering for Jessica by pretending to be her. Their parents don’t know that Jessica hasn’t come home, and both girls are meant to be taking a test, so Elizabeth eats the morning pancakes served by her mum, runs upstairs to change, comes back down as Jessica for another serve of pancakes, and takes the test twice.

I was a sucker for the Californian lifestyle of SVH: who wouldn’t be from damp north London, where I wore a horrible purple school uniform and instead of diners that served hot dogs dripping with chilli, we had cafes that served fried eggs, black pudding and tinned tomatoes? The clothes, the beach, the food! Even the pancakes. For us pancakes were for one day a year, Shrove Tuesday. Thin and served with lemon and sugar, not the thick American kind with syrup. Elizabeth’s boyfriend Todd suggests they go out for a “double-decker mocha almond chip”, whatever that is (ice cream?), and they toast marshmallows. So glamorous to a tween whose parents kept digestive biscuits up high in a tin and could hear me from two floors away if I tried to open it.

Speaking of boyfriend Todd, he provides another bit to chew on regarding Jessica and creepy Scott. When Elizabeth describes Scott as being at fault for the situation, Todd replies: “You make Jessica sound like an innocent bystander . . . I wonder what she was doing all the time Scott was leading her astray with his evil ways.” They have a major falling out, with Elizabeth as defensive as we all are when a family member is critiqued (only I’m allowed to complain about my family!). They have their first big argument, which becomes the new “problem” of the book and the source of the story’s climax and resolution: the perfect couple finally making up.

But in a final blow to feminism, in the end we learn that Jessica’s got “a raging case of poison oak” from her experience in the woods, a “volcano of swollen, red blisters”, which Elizabeth “couldn’t help wondering if she deserved after all”. (Elizabeth, no!) Jessica may not have blamed herself for what happened, but back then everyone else did. And it really does become a story about the uncorrupt Elizabeth: “Nothing, not even a broken heart, deserved more attention than her efforts as a journalist and writer.”

There are plenty of little details I liked this time around, such as Elizabeth’s encounter with Olivia who was “big on things like anti-nuke rallies and organic food. She was always lecturing newspaper staff — in a nice way — about eating too much refined stuff. Her lunches invariably consisted of things like whole-grain bread, meatless spreads, and alfalfa sprouts. She had a loony sense of humour, though, which Elizabeth enjoyed.” Olivia comments to Elizabeth that she is also arguing with her boyfriend: “How can I have a meaningful relationship with someone who believes in offshore drilling?” Quite, Olivia.

She Used To Hate To Read

Not only could you fit SVH in your pocket, you could read a whole book in an hour. Even Francine Pascal took her time to understand the impact of that:

“I never really had the respect for Sweet Valley that I had for my other YA books. I felt it was a kind of soap opera, and that was kind of a lesser thing. I was wrong, because it had [an] enormous effect on people. Essentially it was very important and deserved [respect] — now I see it. At least a quarter of the fan mail that I got started off with “I used to hate to read . . .” It was sometimes from the kid, and sometimes from the par- ent, who would say, “She used to hate to read . . .” That's the best thing that happened [with Sweet Valley]. That and money.”

I wonder if we could take that nugget alone and imagine something to draw in today’s time-poor, reading-shy, teen readers. A whole world, served in small bites.

Thank you for reading Voracious.

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Other posts in this series:

The Midnight Kittens by Dodie Smith

Mrs Pepperpot by Alf Prøysen

For more about Francine Pascal, read Sweet Valley High Creator Francine Pascal Tells All, 35 years Later.

For more about Amy Boesky, read A 'Sweet Valley High' Ghostwriter On Living A Double Life