Have You Been Let Down By a Book?
July 15, 2011 | Erin | Comments (5)
Have you ever heard about a new book in a beloved series and gotten very excited? You wait and wait for it to finally be published, and then you wait and wait for it while it's on hold. Once you finally start reading it, you realize that you really don't like the book at all! I recently had that experience.
Long before Twilight, there was a series of books that all teenage girls read. Francine Pascal's Sweet Valley. There were many Sweet Valley (SV) series which followed the two main characters at different stages in their lives, including, SV Kids, SV Twins, SV High and SV University, to name a few.
The two blonde-haired, blue-eyed California girls might have been identical twins, but they had drastically different personalities. Elizabeth was academic and dreamed of becoming a journalist, while Jessica was flirty and travelled with the in crowd.
Sweet Valley Confidential is the recent adult book that visits the twins ten years after graduating from high school. The twins have had a falling out, over a guy. Elizabeth has fled to New York to write for a theatre magazine/blog, while Jessica surprisingly has remained in Sweet Valley. Right from the first chapter, I knew I was in trouble. Somehow the twins personalities have drastically changed, gone are the girls we once knew. Jessica is suddenly a valley girl, who throws "like" into a sentence for no reason at all. Elizabeth, who used to value and agonize over every relationship, now thinks nothing of one-night stands or "friends with benefits." I know the twins had to grow up and become adults, but I did not realize that they would become people that I would not care for.
Now the writing of these books was never of a very high standard, but the characters were what kept bringing readers back. The best part of the book was the Epilogue that provides a brief "where are they now" for some of the characters from the series. In the end, I felt that I should have left my fond memories of the series in the past. Have you read any books that you looked forward to only to be disappointed and let down?
