Will Jessica steal Todd from Elizabeth?

Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield are identical twins at Sweet Valley High. They’re both popular, smart, and gorgeous, but that’s where the similarity ends. Elizabeth is friendly, outgoing, and sincere—nothing like her snobbish and conniving twin. Jessica gets what she wants—at school, with friends, and especially with boys.

This time, Jessica has set her sights on Todd Wilkins, the handsome star of the basketball team—the one boy that Elizabeth really likes. Elizabeth doesn’t want to lose him, but what Jessica wants, Jessica usually gets . . . even if it ends up hurting her sister.

Meet the Wakefield twins, their guys, and the rest of the gang at Sweet Valley High . . . .

The 1980s were a golden era for soap operas. Adults had the classics such as General Hospital and One Life to Live, of course. Moreover, it was the time of Dynasty, Dallas, and all the other primetime soaps where women in enormous shoulder pads slapped one another for our entertainment. For us girls, though, there was the interminable drama that was the assorted Sweet Valley books. A generation of girls were left asking what the hell a lavalier necklace was.

Francine Pascal and her husband, John, got their start writing for a soap opera called The Young Marrieds, a fact I literally did not know before I settled on how today’s article would begin. They also wrote the notoriously terrible George M.!, a musical about George M. Cohan. (Look, I could keep going on about Francine Pascal, who turns out to be fascinating, but she really deserves her own article. I’ve rearranged the schedule to get to her before 2026, which was my next opening.) Her husband died in 1981, and two years later, she had the idea for a soap opera for kids. A friend suggested she write it as books instead, and you know, she wrote a few of them. Most were written by ghost writers, which I’m pretty sure I knew even as a kid.

This is in no small part because there are a lot of books. There are 181 Sweet Valley High books. There are 85 Sweet Valley University books. There are 152 Sweet Valley Twins books. There are 23 Unicorn Club books. There are a couple of Team Sweet Valley books. There are 32 Sweet Valley Junior High books. There are 88 Sweet Valley Kids books. There are eight Elizabeth books. And, a few years ago, Pascal herself wrote Sweet Valley Confidential, about the Wakefields as young adults—and then apparently even a few books after that.

The books are about the lives of Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield, and anyone who got into them can tell you no little about them. The girls are identical twins, with sparkling blue-green eyes and silky blond hair, with dimples in their left cheeks and matching gold lavalier necklaces that their parents got them for their sixteenth birthday. They also shared a red Fiat Spider. Elizabeth was four minutes older. She’s the studious one, whereas Jessica is impulsive and fun-loving. They live with their parents and older brother, though he goes to Sweet Valley University when the girls are in high school.

Now, obviously, they aren’t all about the girls. They’re about the enormous and complicated Sweet Valley social landscape. Sweet Valley is another fictional town, this one in Southern California. The girls’ lives involve lots of pool parties and beach trips. They also involve the approximately eight billion students of the Sweet Valley schools, most notably Elizabeth’s best friend, Enid Rollins, and Jessica’s best friend, Lila Fowler. Enid is sensible and studious like Elizabeth; Lila is all of Jessica’s flaws turned up to eleven but also rich enough to indulge herself however she wants and basically unsupervised when the girls are in high school.

The world of Sweet Valley is ruthlessly heteronormative. Steven, the girls’ older brother, would realize he was gay in the gap between Sweet Valley University and Sweet Valley Confidential, but despite its being written by Pascal, it’s considered of dubious canonical status anyway. What definitely happened in the world of the books is Standing Out, Sweet Valley Twins #25, which is the story of Billie Layton, one of those characters who’s desperately important for one book. She’s a tomboy and a big deal on the baseball team; her mother is pregnant, Billie gets her period, and she’s got a crush on a boy. She learns how to be pretty and bond with her mother, and she even accepts that they’ll be calling her brother William and she’ll give up her nickname and be Belinda instead.

It’s infuriating sometimes. Billie is allowed to be Belinda if she wants to, but being pressured into being Belinda is different. Enormous numbers of the books are about dating and relationships, and pretty much every boy interested in Elizabeth is also interested in Jessica. The girls look alike, and it’s true that some people have a type, but it’s hard to imagine someone being interested in being in a relationship with both girls even if it’s easy to accept being physically attracted to both girls. Honestly I have a hard time picturing wanting to be in a relationship with Jessica at all, but never mind.

The books are about evenly split between You Will Never Hear Of This Character Again and the recurring cast. There’s a certain amount of continuity from book to book, with a couple of tragic relationships, a couple of dramatic ones, and some ongoing friendships. My favourite as a kid was Sweet Valley High #28, Alone in the Crowd. It was about Lynne Henry, whom I’m pretty sure was only ever in that book except as a background character, who was a talented-but-shy musician. On the other hand, it was easy to recognize when Lila Fowler was on a cover.

I haven’t spent new-book money on Sweet Valley since the ‘90s. I did read Sweet Valley Confidential when it came out, along with about eight million other Gen-X women, but I got it from the library. I’ll say that it’s clear that Pascal wasn’t as obsessive about the world she’d created as a lot of the rest of us, and it also seemed likely to me that she wanted a lot more drama than I think most of us were interested in. It’s not that those books were always low stakes. My Gods they were not. The books are full of plane crashes and kidnappings and cults, terminal illness and car accidents and Elizabeth even went on trial for manslaughter in a series I clearly missed. I even remember one of the summer vacation books that involved a guy whose father was in witness protection.

Yeah. Those books were a lot, and I think Sweet Valley Confidential was leaning into that. However, in the end, we knew it was going to be okay, for the Wakefields if no one else. There’s a comfort aspect to the books, which I think Pascal missed on. It doesn’t matter if there’s an entire series that exists in its form because an earthquake destroys a school. It’s unreal and silly. Having lasting consequences that keep the sisters from being friends for ten years feels wrong.

Oh, there’s also a TV show, but I never watched it and don’t have as much to say about it. The one thing that will utterly fail to surprise anyone who is familiar with that era is that Brittany and Cynthia Daniel, who played the Wakefields, were also Doublemint Twins at one point. Because, if you’re Of A Certain Age and aren’t familiar with Elizabeth and Jessica and what they looked like, they were Doublemint Twins. With matching gold lavalier necklaces.

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