RIP, Francine

[the_oracle]

Francine Pascal has died. I see 2024 will not be content until it has ripped away the very fabric of my childhood and left my soul torn to shreds.


I love this passage from her NYT obituary:
Though some critics panned her books’ utopian settings and fanciful plots, Ms. Pascal was unapologetic.

“These books have uncovered a whole population of young girls who were never reading,” she told People. “I don’t know that they’re all going to go on to ‘War and Peace,’ but we have created readers out of nonreaders. If they go on to Harlequin romances, so what? They’re going to read.”


While I do quibble with certain other things said in the obit, now is not the time for me to trot out some obnoxious Um, actually... nonsense, so we'll circle back to that at a later date when things aren't so fresh, though I do feel that based on how she wrote SVC, she would take the same issue I did. Actually no, let's do that now because why the heck not?


The twins are “the most adorable, dazzling 16-year-old girls imaginable,” Ms. Pascal told People magazine in 1988. They, and the books, are also strikingly innocent: Even as the thoughtful Elizabeth and the scheming Jessica clash over boys, friends and spots on the cheerleading team, drugs, alcohol and sex barely permeate the 181 titles in “Sweet Valley High,” or the scores of others in the spinoffs — and the spinoffs of spinoffs — from the series.

I get the point trying to be made here, and I want so much to agree with it, however, and my god I am that pedantic jerk but we all mourn in our own ways, sex plays a huge role in the latter chunk of SVU (if you took a shot each time Elizabeth worried about her virginity, you would die of alcohol/water/whatever poisoning so many times over that it would be as ridiculous as the plots of those books) and arguably in SVU in general. It definitely comes up in Senior Year and SVC and The Sweet Life each utilize sex as plot points or just try to incorporate it into the story in... interesting ways.

So, yes, SVH proper is very innocent and the spinoffs don't go as hard into realism on the sex/drugs front as other books of their time, but to act as if Liz didn't spend a good solid how many years obsessing over her sex life, or the lack thereof, or that as soon as Liz, Alex/Enid, Todd, and Jessica hit the SVU campus sex was a big part of the first few storylines for all of them is just wrong. How well they managed to handle these things is up for debate but like... you were right on SVH and you should've stopped there because all of the other spinoffs wouldn't have really mentioned sex (middle school and elementary school) or did tackle them.

Also, ask any Gen X/Millennial the ONE storyline they remember from SVH and it'll be Regina dying from trying coke once. Again, not pretending that drugs wouldn't have come up way more often or that drinking (which actually does come up more than you might remember in the first 21 or so books) wouldn't have either but like... that's what the spinoffs DID do.


Anyway, that aside, my heart is broken because as much as I hate SVC and how much I cursed her for it, I always hoped we'd get more after TSL. Sweet Valley was one of the formative series in my life (obviously) and I am forever grateful to have stumbled across the first few books at Phar-Mor and then for my library to have had pretty much everything thereafter for quite awhile. They were generally fluffy and served (sort of) as the morality tales Francine intended, but they weren't without that magic that kept readers coming back for more. I am ever so thankful that these books existed as they did help a lot of kids grow to love to read and that's a gift to the world.