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.
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