I put every Sweet Valley book still in my public library system on hold, and I won a few more from eBay, so expect some recapping goodness in the future!
The first one I will recap is SVU #1: College Girls. I would say it’s fitting, because SVU ended up being my favorite series – I read it for 10 years. It didn’t last for 10 years, but do you know how many Sweet Valley series there are and that I was reading at the same time? It took me a few extra years to catch up. But it’s not really fitting. Fitting would be Sweet Valley Twins #1: Best Friends because that’s where I started it all.
Yay, story time! This is the story of how I came to fall in love with the town of Sweet Valley.
So, it was Spring 1991, and it was the end of second grade. I spent spring break utterly bored because I’d forgotten to check out books from the library, so my mom let me borrow her old Bobbsey Twins books. Yes, this is relevant to the plot. Mom let me read them because she knew of my obsession with twins – I made her watch Degrassi (Jr.) High just a couple years prior because of Heather and Erica. Anyway, I loved the Bobbsey Twins, so when school started back up again, I went to the library to find more books. The Bobbsey Twins happened to be next to another book series featuring twins.
Yes, Sweet Valley Twins. The school only had the first 10 books, though. I could only check out two books at a time back then, and I had a tendency to check out one for my mom every week – stuff like Where the Red Fern Grows and Little House on the Prairie books, stuff I knew she’d like, so it took me two weeks to read all 10 books – I checked out a new one every day.
Well, once I finished reading them, I told my friends how awesome the books were, and they wanted to see for themselves. Soon, the 10 Sweet Valley books my library had was not enough for the girl population of the school. They actually ordered more by third grade, including Sweet Valley High for the older kids.
But there was a meanwhile. Meanwhile, I asked my mom if she could buy me all the Sweet Valley books. She said, “We’ll see,” and I do think it was her honest intent to buy me them. However, there were a lot more than 10 at the time, so my mom came up with a new solution – family needed a library card!
To this day, I wonder if I had never discovered Sweet Valley, would my family still have discovered they had a love for reading, too?
Anyway, I don’t know why SVU was my favorite. I’m pretty sure I had a reason when I was ten, but that was a long time ago. I know I was still reading them when I was twenty because they didn’t bore me yet, which is not a reason to say “it’s my favorite”. I guess the world will never know.
I never really liked The Unicorn Club or Elizabeth, though. Unicorn Club, I read the first four and was like, “Wow, this is horrible,” and never read it again. Elizabeth, I read the first two, thought, “Wow, this is horrible,” but discovered there were only 6 books in the series so I braved through it, wishing the whole time there was a Jessica series, since that was bound to be more interesting.
Okay, that’s enough about my relationship with Sweet Valley! Look for my recap of College Girls coming soon!
