Sweet revenge

I was addicted to the best-selling Sweet Valley High novels in my tween years, even though it was painfully clear I’d never be as beautiful or popular or as blond as bubbly twin protagonists Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield. The annoyingly perfect Wakefields eroded mountains of adolescent self-esteem in the 1980s, and bitterness over this fact lends the otherwise disposable Sweet Valley Confidential: Ten Years Later an enjoyable air of schadenfreude. The novel catches the 27-year-old twins with Elizabeth plotting revenge on Jessica for stealing her long-term boyfriend after a second failed marriage. Sweet Valley just got real, y’all. If we weren’t head cheerleaders, we can celebrate the fact that we’re also not divorcees cussing out our sisters at grandma’s 80th birthday party. Confidential is the only SVH novel 73-year-old series creator Francine Pascal wrote alone, so ignore needless Twitter references and the use of the word like in, like, way too many sentences.