Young Adult Revisited

It’s funny how some of these books tend to stick with you. I probably read this book 17 years ago (good lord, am I dating myself?) and as soon as I started reading it, the whole storyline started running through my head. Sweet Valley has a big three day weekend and everyone is off from school and work on Monday. It’s a big weekend too because Dave Carlquist is doing a live radio show at the mall on Sunday night. He’s a high school senior who ran a radio show and it was so popular that the local station picked it up. I call bull shit on that. Plus Alice is throwing a huge barbecue on Sunday and Lila is having a party on Saturday. Jessica and Elizabeth are shopping for napkins and stuff at the mall. Alice is so busy with planning that she doesn’t have time to get that kind of stuff. Jess gets all distracted by a purple sweater and wants is so bad because she’s in the Unicorn Club and they all love purple. They swing by the mall center, to see them fixing up the stage for the radio s...

I find it hard to believe that readers actually requested/demanded a story devoted solely to Shannon. Plus, if we really wanted to read about her, then why not give her a story in one of the regular books? This one follows Shannon’s life away from the club (kind of) and focuses primarily on her life at home. Her dad is almost never around because he’s either at work or on the golf course. I think he calls/leaves notes 6 or 7 times in the book, saying he won’t be home for dinner. Her sister Maria is obsessed with her swimming and Tiffany is obsessed with her garden. She’s also worried about her mom because she’s obsessed with her daughters and living through them, without having a life of her own. It’s even worse when her dad forgets about Mother’s Day. He gives her a gift that he keeps at the office for situations like this, but she finds out the truth when she opens the birthday card on the front. Shannon decides to focus on herself and on her French classes. The students who h...

April, her friend Jenny and Jenny’s boyfriend Ken are heading to a ski condo for a weekend. None of them are very good friends with Dara, but she asked them as a way to make some new friends. They get there early and wait around for her and her parents. They run into Josh, who Dara knows and who was also invited. Dara shows up, but she doesn’t have her parents. Surprise! The teens are all alone for the weekend. Once they get inside, they meet Tony. His parents and her parents share the house and he got his weekends messed up. He also has this girl Carly with him and Dara is kind of pissed about them both being there. He points out that there are more than enough rooms at the house for everyone, so they agree to stay. The whole group decides to play truth or dare. Ken reveals that he once saw someone drop a $10 bill and took it for himself. Someone asks April to tell them a secret that she wishes she didn’t know. She makes a comment about Summer Island and kind of looks at Ken. The...

Richard Spier made a bad decision: he gave Mary Anne his credit card. The deal is that she can charge as much as she wants to the card, provided she has enough to pay it back. This doesn’t make sense because if she has the money, why wouldn’t she just use it and skip the credit card? Mary Anne goes crazy, as any teenage girl would and buys gifts for everyone and spends more than she planned. She thinks she has six weeks to pay it back, but Sharon points out that credit card bills come fairly frequently and she actually only has two weeks. She makes a list of all the gifts and can’t believe how much she spent. She figures out how much she can make baby-sitting and knows it’s not enough. Luckily the mall is hiring, so she runs down and applies for a job. Another girl sees her application and tells her that the mall won’t hire a 13 year old. Angela changes the number to a 6 and of course she gets the job. The woman barely looks at the application, just asks her a few questions and th...

I’m not sure how I feel about the Unicorn Club books because this was way past my time. I flipped through a few of the earlier books, so I could figure out where this fell in the Sweet Valley line. The books cover the 7th grade year of our favorite girls, but the twins are barely in the books! Liz is in the earlier books, but by this book, only Jess is still a member and she’s only in a few scenes. Lila Fowler is up to her credit card limit, but still wants to get some new clothes. When she stops by to see her dad, she runs into Mitchell Parsons, who’s waiting for his dad to finish up a meeting. They do a little flirting, until their dads come out fighting. Mr. Fowler reveals that he’s in the process of buying Mitchell’s dad’s company and things aren’t going well. Mandy Miller, another member of the club, just got a job working in the kitchen of the country club. I have to point out that this is completely illegal for a 13-14 year old girl. Her first night working is also the nigh...

Jessi’s mom hasn’t been working for awhile, though I don’t remember this ever being mentioned in another book. Not only does she go job hunting without mentioning it to her kids, but she also accepts a job. Jessi’s dad picks her up from dance class and makes it out like he has some big announcement at dinner. She’s convinced that her mom’s pregnant, but it’s just a new job. Right away, she starts thinking about how she needs to plan to take care of Becca and Squirt after school, but dad announces that Aunt Cecilia is coming to stay. The girls are so upset at the news that they immediately make a list of things to do, just to torture her. Cecilia shows up and apparently brings her whole house with her, despite the fact that she’s packing light. Seriously, she’s moving into their guest room and brings dozens of cartons, a birdcage, lamps, two chairs and god knows what else. They end up storing her stuff all around the house. Jessi also short-sheets her bed, puts shaving cream in her...

Janna is your typical teenage girl, except that she’s working as a dancer in a touring production of Grease. Right before she left for the summer, she broke things off with her boyfriend Jimmy Dare. Jimmy thought they would go to college together, get married and live happily ever after. Now she’s just living the single life. After their latest show, she notices Ryan. He’s been with the theater group before and he’s super hot, so she starts blushing as soon as she sees him. She shares a room with three other girls: Liz, Gillian and Tori. Liz warns her about Ryan, saying that they dated last summer, he started cheating on her and then dumped her for another girl. Then he kept moving on to other girls in the group. Weird things start happening and Janna isn’t sure what to think. She gets a card of a broken and torn apart leg, with a note telling her to break a leg. Then someone starts sending her flowers and leaving notes that say they’ll meet soon. Liz points out (accurately) that ...