Book Review: Sweet Valley Confidential by Francine Pascal

Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield were the closest twin sisters you can imagine, and they love each other dearly. However, something shocking has happened which has caused such a rift between the sisters that they haven't spoken for over eight months, Elizabeth has moved across the country to live in New York, miles and miles away from the home she had in Sweet Valley with her sister Jessica, who is now convinced everybody hates her, and she pretty much hates herself too. Despite a successful career in journalism, it's not enough for Elizabeth but she doesn't know how to fix everything she left behind. And with another failed marriage behind her, Jessica just wants to be happy but she can't without her sister around her. Will the Wakefield twins ever heal the rift or this is the end of Elizabeth and Jessica as we know them?

I dare so most women my age, older and younger as well, have grown up reading some form of the numerous Sweet Valley novels with the Wakefield twins, or at least seen the TV show which was on a lot throughout the 1990's. I really loved those books, I read a lot of them, probably not all but a huge portion so when I read that the author Francine Pascal was bringing the characters back, but ten years on from when we first met them, I was both curious to read it and also somewhat dreading it at the same time - would they be as good as I remembered or would it be a cringing revisit to the past that perhaps should have been left there? My copy, with its somewhat dated looking pink cover dropped through my front door, and I sat down to devour it, hoping for the best.



From the opening chapter, I knew it wasn't going to be a literary masterpiece and I was right. The writing style feels a bit clunky and uncomfortable reading, a bit like Pascal was writing for an audience she was totally out of experience with and it definitely felt that way. However, I pushed that aside and ploughed on with the story. We aren't told for a while exactly what has split up the Wakefield twins, but it doesn't take too long for the reader to put two and two together and realise. We meet Elizabeth living in New York, very alone and unhappy, away from her family but doing a job she loves. Jessica is also successful in her career, but also alone and feeling extremely hated. It certainly doesn't ring true of the carefree 17 year old girls I used to read about!

We can certainly tell that the twins have grown up, not just  by the fact the cover tells us that this is "Ten Years On..." but the fact they are adults, living away from home - miles away in Elizabeth's case, but also the multiple references to sex, alcohol and other grown activities throughout the book. Some of these were quite cringing to read, especially the sex scenes which felt a little too overdone for my liking, like Pascal was testing the waters rather than diving straight in with it. Also, I felt the constant name dropping of things like Facebook and Twitter just to bring it into the modern day felt overused and tacky in parts, like they were merely there to function as a reminding tool for the reader, a fact which I felt spoke down to the reader a bit too much.

The story itself is okay, although for a near 300 page novel, not a lot really goes on! We obviously have the break up of the twins for this mystery reason, then the possibility of them meeting up again at an elderly relative's birthday party. All the action leads up to this event, and in between, we are told the story of what happened in the missing 8 months, some flashbacks to further before that too, so the book does jump around a lot. As well as focussing on the main story between Jessica and Elizabeth, we also have to follow what is going on in their modern lives, although I felt the book was weighted a lot more in Elizabeth's favour than Jessica's on this front. The narrative constantly changes too, for the most part being told in the third person which works well because of the amount of characters involved, but then it quickly switches to an untitled first person narrative, so it takes you a few seconds to work out which character is actually speaking.

I couldn't help but feel as I was reading that Pascal has written another Sweet Valley novel for 17 year old's, albeit with the grown up references which, let's face it, most older teenagers happily read about now anyway, yet it is being aimed at the women's fiction market because we grew up with these characters. Don't get me wrong, it was a nice enough read for nostalgia's sake, revisiting characters I haven't read about in around 14 years or so and catching up with them again, but it just felt like it wasn't adult enough to be an adult novel. Things like the name dropping,clunky writing and huge time-hopping in the novel made it quite a hard (not difficult, more taxing) read but I did really enjoy it, all except the somewhat unnecessary epilogue! Fans of Sweet Valley will definitely want to read this, if for nothing but nostalgia's sake but be warned it's as cheesy as we all remember, perhaps if not more so!

Rating: 3/5