Francine Pascal’s Sweet Valley Saga: The Wakefields of Sweet Valley

Follow the riveting stories of the women who came before Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield…

Did any 1980s series spawn more sub-series than Sweet Valley High? Even excluding the hundreds of books featuring the Wakefield twins at different ages (your Sweet Valleys Kids, Twins, Junior High, University… and also that short lived series where they join the Olympic gymnastics and beach volleyball teams as middle schoolers…)

The original Sweet Valley High series ran for 143 volumes published over 15 years (a terrifyingly long time to stay in high school, even if you are a perfect size six with aquamarine eyes). In addition to the mainline series, there were also the Super Editions (twice as thick as the regular paperbacks, often set over school vacations); Super Thrillers (twice as thick with MURDER); Super Stars (twice as thick, focusing on supporting characters both important [LILA FOWLER!!!] and baffling as why they rated a whole backstory [Olivia…?]); and finally the Magna Editions, three times the size and focusing on only the most important aspects of the Pascalverse, such as secret diaries and evil twins (and the evil twin’s evil twin).

Background: The Magna Editions kicked off with a volume (later a quartet of books) detailing the twins matrilineal line… which turns out to be a 120-year series of missed connections, as fate conspires to keep the future Alice Wakefield’s ancestors from marrying the future Ned Wakefield’s ancestors (if you need to brush up on your SVH lore, I am still recommending this overview).

The Plot: In a very Sunfire opening, we are introduced to 16-year-old Alice Larson, recently orphaned and “Somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean”. The year is 1866, and Alice is en route from her native Sweden to join her aunt and uncle in New York.

When a young passenger is washed overboard during a sudden storm, Alice leaps in to save him, and ends up being saved herself by the handsome young Englishman, Theodore Wakefield, and shipboard romance quickly blooms. Theodore proposes and suggests they have the captain marry them onboard, but Alice makes a fateful decision:

“Let us marry in the New World, as Americans.”

Alice and Theodore are separated when the ship disembarks at the emigration station in Battery Park- and I appreciate that the ghostwriter at least did enough research to not have them be processed at Ellis Island, which wouldn’t open until 1892. Unbeknownst to Alice, Theodore is sent to quarantine at the typhus sanitarium on Ward’s Island. When Alice’s uncle shows up to collect her, she has no choice but to go with him, never to see Theodore again. Especially, since Uncle Par has great news, they are moving to Minnesota.

The Larsons’ journey is by both train and steamboat and Alice sees corn for the first time, which will become a big part of her life in Prairie Lakes, Minnesota. She also eventually gets over Theodore enough to marry a prosperous hard-working local farmer named George Johnson, and gives birth to the first older brother Steven (who dies in infancy, not even getting to live to forever go to college and hang out with high school girls), followed by identical blonde twins Elisabeth (with an S) and Jessamyn (which does not sound like an 1870s name).

So, this is where things start to get weird with the storytelling. We get a few sets of twins throughout the century-and-a-quarter of ancestors, who behave exactly like their 1980s counterparts. But it is also the story of the star-crossed romances between 1980s-Mom’s ancestors and 1980s-Dad ancestors. So things start to feel Oedipal (Electrical?) fairly quickly where the twins are involved.

Elisabeth and Jessamyn are exactly the same as their 80s counterparts- Elisabeth is serious and proper and all-in on Prairie Lakes renowned Corn Bees and is courted by Tom Wilkens, a dull but much less volatile implied-Todd ancestor; meanwhile Jessamyn is daring and flirtatious, although somewhat less of a sociopath than her 80s counterpart. Since it is 1893, her only opportunity for fame and fortune is to become a circus bareback rider, obviously.

There are a few other Sweet Valley tropes translated into the 19^th century, such as token inclusion of minorities, in this case a wise old Native American named Peter Bluecloud, whom Jess thinks of as “something like a special grandfather” and exists solely to teach her how to ride bareback, aid and abet her running away to join the circus, and then conveniently die.

It is this crisis that sets Elisabeth (Lis?) off in search of her sister and- twist! It is the more cautious and retiring twin that gets thrown off a horse and killed. Also 1800’s Alice suspects that the magician known as The Magnificent Theo W., employed by the same circus, is her long-lost former fiancée.

By the turn of the century, Jessamyn has relocated to San Francisco, where she manages a hotel and is embroiled in a love triangle with auto magnate Taylor Watson and race-car driver Bruce Farber (an ancient Patman relative, perhaps?)

Bruce proposes just breathless seconds before the 1906 earthquake, and when Taylor is trapped in the burning hotel, he refuses to rush in to save him, Patmanly explaining:

“Jessamyn, Taylor Watson is my rival.”

He blackmails Jess into accepting his proposal, but she goes backsies on it when Taylor escapes the flames, and she leaves Bruce and San Fran behind for Detroit.

Two years later Jess is the mother of another older brother (this one is called Harry) and girl-twin combo, Samantha and Amanda. Sam is the Jess, Amanda is the Liz.

The 1920s section is a mash-up of every cliché and piece of slang you imagine, which kind of set my teeth on edge (stop saying “giggle water”, Sam!) But this is also point where we just have 1920s versions of 1980s supporting characters, including fan faves such as delinquent dirtbag Rick Andover (here called Kevin Hughes, a bootlegger with a raccoon coat).

Brother Harry has actually left the house in 1925, and the twins are excited to meet his sheiky roommate, Ted Wakefield, who also moonlights as a reporter and mansplains jazz to us:

“There are different combinations of instruments every time, and people play without music. They improvise and you never hear the same thing twice.”

Again, we have a token minority character, here jazz musician CC Earl, who is of course a close personal friend of Ted, who escorts Samantha to the roadhouse to hear him play (Amanda’s date is her brother).

Sam is of course so in love with Ted (see? Weird!) but when Ted reads one of Amanda’s poems they start secretly long-distance dating. When Sam finds out she is enraged and pulls that 1980s favorite: she secretly switches places with her twin. However, this time it is to get her boyfriend-dad arrested by the FBI for rum running. Although the charges against Ted are dismissed, he leaves town, vowing to never see Amanda again. Amanda figures out what happened pretty quickly (“Goodness knows it wouldn’t have been the first time Samantha had pretended to be her.”) and confronts her twin, who argues that framing Ted on federal charges is just payback for her stealing her man! This causes a rift in the twins’ relationship.

Six months later Amanda still isn’t speaking to Samantha as she graduates from high school and packs up for Hollywood, where she instantly finds fame, fortune and a new man, foreign correspondent Jack Lewis. Amanda refuses to attend the wedding, but the twins reconcile on Samantha’s deathbed, just after she gives birth to non-twin Marjorie.

Now forever a spinster (why?) Amanda moves to California to raise her niece and not get romantically involved with her dead sister’s husband. For once. Amanda becomes a beloved English teacher at (wait for it) Sweet Valley High (School). But by 1935 Jack has accepted a position at the AP’s Paris bureau and is taking Marjorie with him for the foreseeable future, because it sounds like there is going to be a lot to report in the coming years.

The Word War II chapters are the weirdest. There is no mention of Hitler and the word “Nazi” is never uttered, so everything remains murky as Jack is arrested for espionage and Marjorie goes into hiding in the basement of a winery with a 12 year old Jewish girl, Sophy, whose older brother, Jacques, is fighting for the French resistance and also is a TOTAL HUNK.

Soon enough teenaged Marjorie is working as radio operator for the Resistance, relaying messages of the daring exploits of American pilot Charles Robertson, when this message comes over the wire:

Agent Lewis suspected of planning his own arrest to work within the walls of prisoner-of-war camps.

Arrested on purpose! Marjorie’s head spun. Her father was every inch a hero!

Umm, might disagree on that one, you can’t just leave your 14-year-old daughter in occupied France to go play Hogan’s Heroes, dude.

After Sophy is arrested, this does give Marjorie an idea for a daring scheme. Conspiring with Jacques, she arranges with a not-so-bright local “collaborationist” to swap herself for Sophy’s freedom:

“You might think Pierre is some kind of monster, but he’s really just a simple person. He takes orders from the people who are giving them. Right now, that means the Germans.”

You know, that whole banality of evil trip.

The plan is to do the prisoner exchange, then Marjorie and Jacques will run away and jump on the train that has just departed with Sophy, and Marjorie will presumably head to Marseilles… across the Mediterranean to Oran… then by train, or auto, or foot across the rim of Africa, to Casablanca in French Morocco. Here, the fortunate ones through money, or influence, or luck, might obtain exit visas and scurry to Lisbon; and from Lisbon, to the New World. But the others wait in Casablanca… and wait… and wait… and wait.

Sorry, I am getting carried away.

Things go wrong when the police show up and in the resulting bloodbath Jacques is killed, as Marjorie watches from the departing train. Always ready to sacrifice for the main character, Sophy nobly locks herself in the train compartment, shoves her letters of transit under the door and jumps out the window, presumably on to a career annoying Nazis with guitar renditions of “La Marseillaise”.

By the early 1960s, Marjorie is married to the American pilot previously mentioned, and is living back in Sweet Valley with two daughters, Nancy and Alice. Alice is making a family tree, but even she has to admit “It’s all kind of confusing”.

The final section is set in the “Late 60s. Campus of the College of Southern California”, although a close reading will reveal that it is fall of 1969 because Woodstock has already happened (Alice did not go).

Alice and her friend Jenny are big into campus politics, including participating in the occupation of the administration building after a popular professor is fired. Alice is pursued by both wealthy square Hank Patman and long-haired law student Ned Wakefield (I know Ned is also a diminutive of Theodore, but I like to pretend his full name is Neodore). Will Alice finally shake the family curse and marry the man she is destined to be with? Well, she actually ends up engaged to Hank, after he provides a helicopter drop of food to the starving occupying students:

Up on the roof were hundreds of students in patched jeans and vests, shirts decorated with tiny mirrors or bright beads- a sea of flower children, arms stretched to the sky.

Overhead, a chopper hovered… from its open door, dozens of bags were being dropped, each attached to a tiny parachute. The chutes were painted with bold peace signs and bright flower-power daisies.

“It’s like manna from heaven!” yelled a tall, frizzy haired blond girl.

While Alice accepts Hank’s proposal and moves forward with planning a formal wedding, she suspects that Hank is still playing the field when she catches him with his arm around another woman at their engagement party (It’s called free love, babe!); but it is not until she is literally about to walk down the aisle that she overhears Hank bragging that befriending the hippies was just a scheme to become popular. Fleeing the Patman compound she drives all the way to Neodore’s apartment and throws himself into his arms.

I mean, this kind of explains when they almost got divorced in books #65-67 and then again in #102.

We end “A number of years later” with a Steven Wakefield that has survived infancy welcoming home his newborn twin sisters, the most chilling scene since the finale of Rosemary’s Baby.

Art Department: The book had at least three different editions, the first and best featuring the elaborate gate-fold art that opens to reveal several scenes from the book:

(image courtesy of Snark Valley)

There is also a simplified version without the inside art, just depicting four generations of Wakefield ancestors. And finally, an even more simplified version with just 60s Alice and 80s Elizabeth.