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Sweet Valley High.

Article Excerpt
It's the moment I've been waiting for: Francine Pascal's Sweet Valley High is returning to print. Like other women of a certain age, I grew up with Sweet Valley High and continue to wrestle with my love-hate relationship with the series' perfect blonde heroines. As young teens, my own twin sister and I compared ourselves with the Wakefield twins and came up sorely lacking. (Glasses? Check. Braces? Check.) Today, we ask ourselves why we bothered. In spite of this backward-glancing cynicism, I own the Sweet Valley High board game (I still play it); I keep paperback copies of the first ten Sweet Valley books in my office (the rest are at home); I even wrote my dissertation about the series.

Following the appearance of the first volume in 1983, Francine Pascal's Sweet Valley High became one of the most successful series of the twentieth century. The romance-themed novels starred gorgeous and popular sixteen-year-old twins Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield, detailing their flirtations and long-term relationships. Although their identical appearance rendered them nearly indistinguishable, readers soon learned that Elizabeth was the studious and responsible twin who authored their school newspaper's gossip column while Jessica was the sneaky and conniving twin who led the cheerleading squad. Set in the fictional town of Sweet Valley, California, the series introduced a (mostly white) cast of supporting characters whose problems mattered only insofar as they affected...

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