It was announced earlier this week that the creator of the world of Sweet Valley, Francine Pascal, died at the age of 92. It’s difficult to explain the huge impact she had on an entire generation of readers. I was first introduced to Sweet Valley Twins in elementary school and was immediately hooked. Anything I could dream up, they didn’t just dream of; they did. One of my favorite SVT books was The Unicorns Go Hawaiian, in which 12-year-old Jessica wins a pineapple cooking contest and heads to Hawaii with her friends. It was escapist fantasy pitched to readers as something that could happen in real life, and I gobbled it up.
Within a few years, I discovered Sweet Valley High, the series that started it all. Dozens of SVH books were already out by the time I found the series, and I devoured every single book I could get my hands on. I can’t look back on my childhood without thinking of memories that involve Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield, their friends, and the world of Sweet Valley. In multiple interviews, Francine Pascal described the series as a teenaged soap opera, and I couldn’t agree more. The twins went to a party or dance in almost every book; Elizabeth had a long-term boyfriend while Jessica was always after a new guy, so you could both swoon for the new romance and swoon over a steady love story; there were snobby, rich kids in the school like Lila Fowler and Bruce Patman whom you couldn’t help but love; and almost every book had a self-contained plot and subplot that wrapped up nicely by the end of the installment.
I have vivid memories of discussing Sweet Valley with friends. Were we more like Jessica or Elizabeth? I would scour libraries and bookstores for Sweet Valley books I hadn’t read yet or didn’t own. We would discuss our favorite books; I remember agreeing with a friend that the first Sweet Valley High book, Double Love, was the ultimate Sweet Valley book because Jess was more devious, more conniving, more ruthless, than she was in any subsequent book. We put together our own role playing game in which we each chose a Sweet Valley character (I was Elizabeth) and wrote letters to each other as these characters. I wrote Sweet Valley fan fiction before I even knew the word fanfic; in my imagined world, the twins were adults and Liz was, of course, married to Todd Wilkins. A friend and I used Francine Pascal’s world as inspiration to write our own series that was basically a knockoff of Sweet Valley High, except ours featured triplets instead of twins. We were excited when the Sweet Valley University series began and eagerly read the first book as soon as it was released. We found the Caitlin books and devoured those, another series created by Francine Pascal featuring a heroine similar to Jessica but even more calculating.
Sweet Valley was a staple of my childhood friendships, but I can also credit Sweet Valley as the reason some of my adult friendships began. I met one of my now best friends at a mutual friend’s party, where we forged an almost immediate unbreakable bond when one of us brought up having read and loved Sweet Valley High. How could we not become friends after sharing such an important part of our childhoods?
As I grew older, the Sweet Valley universe became less prominent in my day to day life. I’d occasionally read a book if I came across it, but I wasn’t actively seeking them out or reading the subsequent series that were released. At some point, my old collection of Sweet Valley High books was unearthed and I started rereading them anew. I bought more installments off eBay and searched for books in thrift stores. Just looking at the pastel covers of the twins and their friends, clad in dated outfits and looking the same as they ever did, causes a wave of nostalgia to crash over me. The series isn’t perfect and not all the content holds up in today’s world, but reading them still brings me joy. Rereading these books is the closest thing to traveling back in time to a period in life where my biggest concern was whether Liz and Todd would end up together.
Sweet Valley Confidential: Ten Years Later was released in 2011, the first new Sweet Valley book in almost two decades, not counting the updated Sweet Valley High books that were released in 2008 and featured the original plot lines but had been updated to include cell phones and modern references. I don’t think I’d ever been so excited for a book’s release as I was when Sweet Valley Confidential was announced. A brand-new book! Liz and Jessica, in their twenties!! I received a compact from the publisher featuring the original Double Love cover, swag created to get readers excited about the book. As if I wasn’t excited enough already!
I bought the book on release day and devoured it. It wasn’t exactly what I’d hoped for, but its epilogue, featuring short updates on what most of the main characters were up to, was everything I wanted. I squealed more than once while reading these updates! Francine Pascal signed a copy of this book for me, something that I still treasure.
Following Sweet Valley Confidential, a six-part novella series called The Sweet Life, came out in 2012, a new installment digitally released each week about the twins and friends at 30. These novellas had a similar feel to the original Sweet Valley High books and were so soapy, so delicious, so exciting, and so dramatic. I loved these and desperately wanted the series to continue. I was so happy that Francine Pascal had returned to the world of Sweet Valley and was giving us new material, new stories, new adventures.
What made Sweet Valley so addictive? Was it the existence of two twins, each of whom you could identify with in different ways? Was it their lack of parental supervision? Was it the broad scope of their adventures, taking them everywhere from France to England to New York and more? Was it the fictional town of Sweet Valley, where you could spend days surfing and nights dancing at the Beach Disco? Was it the idealized version of teenaged life in America, where everyone had their own car, shopping sprees were the norm, dances happened every week, and everyone ultimately got along?
The twins and friends were able to have more adventures in their junior year than anyone in reality, not just because of how much they did but because a normal people are only sixteen for one year, not decades. The twins embodied the desire to stay forever in a moment/day/year of your choosing. It is the equivalent of traveling back or forward in time and staying there until you, the reader, choose to leave. The broad scope of the Sweet Valley Universe saw the twins in 2nd grade, 6th grade, 7th grade, 8th grade, 11th grade, 12th grade, college, and beyond; whatever age you wanted to visit them, they were there. Sweet Valley was real life… but better. (Mostly.)
Francine Pascal did not write every Sweet Valley book, but she created the world and created the storylines that we all fell in love with. Judging by the worldwide popularity of this series, the people who continue to share their fond memories of Sweet Valley, the podcasts and blogs devoted to Sweet Valley, the Sweet Valley Twins graphic novels that are now being updated and published for a new generation of readers to enjoy, I know I’m not alone in my love of this world. I’ve read books in which the author credits Francine Pascal for inspiring them to pursue a writing career. I’ve seen the tributes pouring in for her after her death was announced.
It feels like the end of an era, despite it being more than a decade since the last new Sweet Valley book was published. I had held out hope that more might come one day; this was, after all, a series in which the twins existed simultaneously at multiple ages, in multiple years. Instead, I will be happy with the huge number of books that were released and the characters and stories that can always be revisited. Thank you to the ghostwriters for bringing this world to life, and thank you to Francine Pascal for creating it.