Sweet Valley High is back! And it's got a Gossip Girl makeover. I'm not really pissed that they're making the Wakefield twins a size thinner, or that the girls will drive a Jeep instead of a Fiat. But I'm ticked that they're upgrading it at all. The series is a fantastic representative of the girl genre in the 80s. It's a time capsule--why not leave the original books as such? Don't fear the past, Random House. What's next: Laura Ingalls Wilder getting a hip job as a prairie au pair and texting her friends about it?At the same time, I'm super jealous that I don't get to be the editor on the relaunch. That's the job I was born to do, dammit! I read dutifully until #100 or so, when it was time to stop and relinquish the brand to the next group of tweeners. As a kid, I studied all the new SVH covers in B. Dalton books, and had most of them read while my parents did other stuff around the mall. I walked out of the library with stacks of the older, 1983-tastic books. I had the board game (I was always Elizabeth). If pressed, I could probably still talk fluently about plotlines and characters.
I hope they don't change the deeply literary prose: Jessica stared at herself in the full-length mirror and saw a picture of utter heartbreak and despair. But what was actually reflected in the glass was about the most adorable, most dazzling sixteen-year-old girl imaginable.
2 comments:
I really think we read the same exact books as kids.
My big excitement was going to the library every Sunday, flipping through the paperback racks and staring at all the SVH covers hoping to find a new one I hadn't read yet. But even if not, I'd reread the same ones again and again and again.
Ugh, I hated Lila. Oh man, how I hated her. And Jessica, really.
See, that's why we need to resurrect the childhood book blog idea. Screw Jezebel. :)
Also, I propose a lunchtime field trip to Borders when the SVH books come out, if only to sigh loudly and tell the kids around how much better the books used to be back in the day.
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