the early bird special

Click on the picture to read the full text of the press release, but the gist is that Random House is rereleasing a revamped version of Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield, the fictional subjects of a myriad novels in the Sweet Valley High empire. Futher, these notoriously innappropriately mature twins from Southern California are all updated for 2008. I didn't jump on this story right away, because I mostly don't care. Despite my voracious consumption of young adult novels as a pre-teen, I don't remember reading many Sweet Valley High books. They mostly came out in the 80's, so they were slightly before my heyday, and I think my mother was either vaguely or explicitly dissaproving of the subject matter. I know I read one or two, because I can recall a plot line about the twins pretending to be triplets to play a mean trick on a new boy in school, and another plot about one of the twins falling in love with a famous pop star. Mostly, however, at that age I just wasn't that interested in the travails of driving around in a sweet Fiat, chasing boys, and reapplying lipgloss. To an 8 to 11 year old me, The Babysitter's Club was much more glamorous, with their secret junk-food stashes and responsible personalities, and those were the overpriced paperbacks on which I spent my carefully hoarded weekly allowance.

Random House proudly trumpets several modern edits to the essence of being a Wakefield twin; for starters, a Jeep Wrangler is now the covet-worthy car they'll be cruising in and bickering over. Which I guess makes sense, because even the most casual viewer of My Super Sweet Sixteen knows that the kids don't give a shit about the environment and that coups are so passe. I still don't care about Elizabeth's journalistic aspirations, although I think her secret gossip website is probably a little too cheap and obvious of a rip-off of Gossip Girl. Most glaring and disgusting, however, is the brash assertion that the 80's Wakefields were fat, and that in 2008, the "perfect" size is no bigger than a 4. What? What?! I hate people sometimes.