My Life in…

Elizabeth is in New York City, working as a writer for a low-budget Off-Broadway review guide. She has left Sweet Valley after Jessica’s latest shocking act of betrayal – She slept with Todd, Elizabeth’s boyfriend, and after Elizabeth left, they started dating and are planning to get married. Elizabeth has cut ties with her sister, but at her mother’s insistence comes back for her grandmother’s birthday party. She does not come back with playwright and Todd-lookalike Will, but with Liam, a hot bartender that she knows is just her sister’s type. Elizabeth insists she’s not trying to break up Jessica and Todd, but in Sweet Valley, everyone has a motive.

This was pretty much the worst book ever written. And I say this as someone who has read every single Sweet Valley High, Sweet Valley University, and Sweet Valley: Senior Year (not to mention the vast majority of the Twins and Unicorn Club books), and only stopped when I was 20 because they stopped publishing them. It’s boring; the sentence level writing is dreadful. Most of the characters don’t even feel like the same ones from the previous books (which isn’t to say they were well-developed in the first place). The last chapter which recounts what has happened to characters from the past is painful and unnecessary. Some of the characters included barely merit a mention in a list of every Sweet Valley character ever, let alone a paragraph in this book. And why on earth is Steven gay and dating Aaron Dallas? Who thought that was a good idea?

Terrible. I’ve probably spent thousands of dollars on Sweet Valley books in my life, but I wouldn’t mind getting a refund for this one.