Best House
Screw the Wakefields’ split-level ranch… the hands down winner is the Davidson house as described in Book 16:

Rad!

You always wondered what one of these looked like, didn’t you?

Best Car
And to hell with the black Porsche… I’ll take Lila’s lime-green Triumph convertible!

Stupidest Name
Care of the Super Edition, Perfect Summer, there’s Jessica’s crush: Robbie October. ROBBIE OCTOBER?! Sounds like a porn star.

Worst Special Edition
If they mean “special” in the “special ed.” sense…. Spring Fever was pretty wretched, y’all. See, Liz and Jess go to visit their great-aunt and -uncle in this little Kansas town, Walkersville… and Uncle Herman Walker is THE MAYOR! First of all, there’s the throw-away detail that the aunt and uncle’s last name is “coincidentally the same as Steven’s girlfriend Cara Walker’s last name” (but to make it worse, there’s a typo, so it’s “Cora Walker”). Someone couldn’t come up with a different last name for the aunt and uncle instead…? So anyway… as great-nieces of the mayor, Liz and Jess are, like, local celebrities, and as such, they incur the deep envy of all 10 teenaged girls in town, who then snub them royally. There’s a cute boy who pretends to be twins to date both Liz and Jess, there’s dramatic curfew-breaking tension, there’s a dramatic runaway horse rescue, there’s all sorts of down-home Midwestern yee-hawin’, and there’s even a square dance. And there’s also enough suckage to drain the Wakefields’ backyard swimming pool. Yeesh.

Worst Super Thriller
As if “Super Thriller” wasn’t enough to connote “worst”…? Anyway. Take Murder in Paradise. Jessica and Elizabeth go off to Paradise Spa with their mother and Lila and Lila’s mother and Enid for a retreat… but it turns out that the whole retreat—nay, the whole SPA—is an elaborate ruse of REVENGE! See, the woman who owns and runs the spa, Tatiana Mueller, went to college with Alice Wakefield and “worshiped” Alice, who was “The Most Popular Girl on Campus”… but Tatiana was ugly and homely and they all called her “Tatty Mule.” So she’s spent the last 20 years becoming a doctor and skilled plastic surgeon and training an assistant and kidnapping and brainwashing runaways so she can practice plastic surgery on them and create this whole beauty spa place with secret caves behind a waterfall with a laboratory, all so that she could STEAL ALICE ROBERTSON WAKEFIELD’S FACE! Talk about “worst makeover”! And Alice Wakefield doesn’t even remember the name “Tatiana Mueller” or anything. Arduous. (This is the book that actually stopped my 15-year Sweet Valley habit.)

Guilty (adj): Responsibility for or charged with a reprehensible act.

Biggest Guilty Pleasure
For me, I admit it… it’s the, ahem, Cheerleading Madness trilogy. Shhh! Don’t tell anyone! I also dig the College one. I know. But it’s “guilty pleasure” okay?

Worst (or Best, as the case may be) Out-of-Context Dialogue
From Perfect Summer: “But Courtney,” protested Todd, “I saw you flip your butt into those bushes . . . .”

Worst Title
That Fatal Night. Um, how was it fatal? No one died. Even Ken Matthews’ eyesight/football dreams didn’t “die.” Stupidheads.

Did Anyone Even Proofread?
SVH #19, Showdown:

“Oh, my god,” [Jessica] yelled. “Now what’s happening. What are you doing in my bag?”

Hello, question marks? Capitalization? Anyone?

Worst Scholastic Information/Interpretation of a Literary Work
Because of Liz’s so-called literary ambitions, there’s the occasional attempt at convincing the readers that SOMEONE in Sweet Valley is knowledgeable of literary matters. 14-year-old Dwanollah was too stupid to know the difference, but, further on down the road, I found out just how, um, unreliable a source SVH was on literary matters. To wit:

But [Lynn] still got a bad taste in her mouth when she remembered the sound of Mr. Collins’s voice, reading the Emily Dickinson poem out loud:       “I’m nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too?”       She had sat up with a start, shaken out of her daydream, her heart pounding. “I’m nobody! Who are you?” It was as if Mr. Collins had found her diary and read it out loud. She could have written those lines. It was as if her own inner voice were speaking! …She had never felt so terrible before. I’m nobody, she kept thinking. What a depressing thing to say. How could Emily Dickinson have written that? (SVH 28, Alone in the Crowd, 10-11)

Okay, first off, get it right. It’s “I’m Nobody! Who are you!” with a capital N… and no question mark, but two exclamation marks. But beyond that… Dickinson wasn’t writing a sad, lonely poem about how lonely she was, how she felt like she was a “nobody”…. This poem is actually a fairly wry, satirical look at writers and the public/publishing market. Her act of identifying herself as “Nobody” in terms of social/writerly reputation is one of power and active choice, a self-conscious and assured naming of herself. People who are “somebody,” by contrast in Dickinson’s poem, lead a dreary life in the “bogs” of society. For God’s sake, I HATE the inaccurate stereotype of Dickinson as the sad, lonely, repressed woman living only through her poetry and trying to speak to all the other lost, lonely girls out there!

And then there’s a selection from Book #38, Leaving Home:

And at about the same time, Mr. Collins, her favorite teacher, suggested that Elizabeth read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night for an extra-credit assignment. Suddenly Dick Diver, the protagonist f the novel, became Elizabeth’s hero. She couldn’t put the book down, and when she was finished with it, she had romanticized everything to do with Dick Diver—including Geneva, the city where he’d studied medicine. (SVH 38, Leaving Home, 6)

Did the SVH authors have ANY idea what Tender is the Night was about?! I mean, the novel centers on Diver’s fall from fortune, loss of everything… how his life and marriage render him powerless, how he screws up his nutty wife and messes with a young Hollywood starlet. There are power struggles and corruption and scandal and madness and death. Is there ANYTHING in this novel that could be “romanticized”? Is there ANY WAY that Dick Diver could be a “hero”? This empty man who destroys his life and is left a walking dead person… heroic and romantic? Huh?

Moment When It All Started To Go Really, Really Downhill
I won’t use the phrase “jump the shark” (because the phrase has already jumped the shark, doncha know?), but there was a point where the tones of Sweet Valley changed. I’m not sure if they were trying to be More Important or Different or Grow With Their Target Audience or Gain New Readers or what… but with On the Edge and Outcast, the Regina’s Death books, things got kind of dark and weird in Sweet Valley. Not only that, there was the influx of more Big Issue-related books instead of the usual popularity and/or boyfriend-girlfriend stuff. It just wasn’t the same after that. Sure, there were still the Hilarities and Hijinx mixed in there, but after that point, there was a new level of melodrama, that After School Special feeling

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