Sweet Valley Online Update: Next Stop… Sweet Valley High!
Hello!
I’m Raven.
You know me, right? I’m [this guy]. One of the three recappers on this wonderful and irreverent recapping site.
When we started, back in 2017, our vision was clear. We’d recap all the books in the Sweet Valley Twins series, three recaps per month, until we were done. The Twins series is Dove’s favourite, from her childhood, and both Wing and I were Sweet Valley Twins virgins going in.
Not any more.
With the final two books (the Next Stop: Jnr High books, which Wiki informs me are technically the openers for the Sweet Valley Junior High series), we’re done and dusted with the Sweet Valley Twins series. That’s every main series book, every Special Edition, every Super Chiller, every Magna Edition, and even every book in the Team Sweet Valley and Unicorn Club subsets.
That’s a lot of Twin Magic, folks.
How’s it been? Great fun! … … … on the whole.
Singularly? We’ve battled through some proper clunkers. But the series as a whole has been tackled with vim, vigour, venom and vitriol. We’ve enjoyed the process, and the interaction, and we hope you have too. And now, we have a fulsome Back Catalogue, which is super cool.
So where do we go from here?
Early on, we decided to expand our Recap Ambition to encompas the whole of the Sweet Valley Cinematic Universe. This was planned to be approached in timeline order, so after Twins we’d head to Junior High, then High, then Senior Year, then University, and so on. That sounded cool to us, back in 2018.
Thing is, for that to make real sense, we should have started at Kids. We didn’t do this, so there’s nothing that’s dictating our next project, or the chronology of things going forward.
Thus, we’ve taken an Executive Decision.
First, now that we’ve finished Twins, we’re taking a little time off. Nothing too much, mind, just enough to recharge the batteries and eat a celebratory piece of cake or two. We’ve done a lot of damn recaps, after all.
We’ll be back at the beginning of September. And what are we coming back with…?
Recaps… of the Sweet Valley High series.
From Double Love to Party Weekend, with all the books in between.
That’s right, folks… it’s time to hit the Main Event. The Big Kahuna. The Spiciest Sausage. The EndBoss.
Sweet. Valley. High.
We will return to Junior High. Hell, we’ll return to Kids in the fullness of time. But to tell the truth, we want to kick things into a higher gear, and get rolling with the series which has the largest fanbase and fullest catalogue. Thirty more Junior High books is another ten months of breadsticks and nibbles, and after the Twin-shaped starter we’ve just consumed, we’re so ready to chow down on the main course.
I hope you’re as excited as we are by this decision. It’s going to be great fun.
There’s more to tell, of course. We’ve wider plans, with podcasts and Patreon content and merchandise and guest recaps and giveaways and surpises and more. That’s for later. We’ve gotta keep something up our sleeves for September, after all.
So!
September 5th, 2022. Our first recap of the Sweet Valley High series. Double Love. Recapped by yours truly.
Welcome to the Brave New World. And be sure to save the date.
Yours, as ever,
Raven, Dove and Wing.
Yay! I was honestly not looking forward to Junior High. SVH is where it’s at! Hope you have a blast with it!
I’m not sure we could have faced another 30 books in first person. And the final swings of Twins has really taught us that we’re not in the mood to meet new people who will not be there in the next series.
Plus SVJH (and SVSY) are the most “realistic” years so they’re SVT does gritty 90s drama. I couldn’t be arsed to care for the handful I read
I absolutely cannot wait for SVH! I was such a fan back in The Day. I want to say thanks to the three of you for your sensational super snark, it helps me through my rough times. Enjoy your break!
I’m so glad you’re going to go straight to SVH! As someone who has read all the spinoffs, Kids is better than Junior High and that’s not saying much- in a weird way I actually missed reading about Liz and Jess when I read SVJH (and the senior year series) because there were so many characters I did not give a fuck about. I already have some idea about what the three of you will say about certain SVH plots haha and there’s something very fitting about Dear Sister falling on Halloween.
Totally agree about Kids. I would rank the series SVH, SVT, SVU, Kids, the others.
Dear Sister is Halloween? Brilliant. I am excited and scared for these
I’d go with SVT, SVH, SVU and then I haven’t read enough to make an assessment, but Twins hit me int he tween years, so it has all that nostalgia, whereas I bought a few High as I aged out of Twins, but when you age out of Twins, you’re aging out of High too.
I’ve just re-read Double Love in preparation of September, and yeah, I can see why the series never fully caught my attention. It’s one of the more basic 90s YAs I’ve ever read. The style is incredibly simple, and while teen Dove wouldn’t have the awareness or vocab to cite that as a reason, I do remember thinking, “Oh, it’s not more grown up, is it?” – and I think that’s what I meant at the time. I have read (and enjoyed) some, but Double Love is not good enough to start such a huge franchise. And yet it did.
Also, check out our new comment options. I think I’ve finally installed something that will actually notify us of new comments! 🙂
How exciting!! I was on the young end of the series, so my younger sister was way off the radar. I had her read this in her late teens and she was so horrified by it, especially Jessica, but I coaxed her into reading on and she ended up a fan. Double Love is also significantly longer than most other books, and I cannot wait for the attempts to track continuity. I know there’s a big dump of facts in the first one, like the rivalry of the Fowlers and Patmans. Maybe it mentions what law Ned does, that’s not a detail I would have remembered.
I still can’t get over that massive continuity issue right in the first chapter of Double Love! Which yes, I realize SVH came first but you’d think the ghostwriters would have paid attention to it when adding this certain character to the other spinoffs.
I know they want to continue the thread but it’s a BIG FUCKING DEAL here.
I definitely think there was a misconception that SVH was more “grown-up” than Twins which not really. SVU definitely is in some aspects. Elizabeth was cooler in Twins, I’ll say that haha.
100%. My mom forbade it for being too old, which sure there’s a couple booze references and a single breast reference in the first 10ish books. She doesn’t remember specifically why anymore, but given that I remember her reading the same but different descriptions to me, she might have been correctly worried about the horrible things it said about girls and self esteem. Meanwhile, they raised me with far too much and my looks mirror the twins’ so I didn’t see any problem with that section lol
I’m excited! I found this blog earlier this year after reading my way through Devil’s Elbow and needing MORE DOVE AND WING CONTENT and blasted my way through and have been up to date for a while now. Roll on September…
Only a couple more weeks to go. I can’t speak for all the recappers, but I foresee so much rage in our future! Wing will go BOOM.