Young Adult Revisited

  In case you didn't know, Cammi Adams and Randy Mason are the two smartest kids in Sweet Valley Middle School. Mr. Clark, the principal, announces a new contest called Scholar of the Semester. All the local schools will participate with one top student named at the end of the semester. Both Cammi and Randy are in the running. If either win, the whole sixth grade will get a day off school. Jessica decides that one of the two must absolutely win because she's totally sick of school. She goes to them both and offers to help, but they blow her off. Jessica gives them advice such as stealing the other's homework and sucking up to their teachers. Cammi worries that Randy listened to Jessica and puts a bike lock on her locker. Randy sees her and thinks she listened to Jessica, so he takes all his books home with him. When they come to school the next day, they learn that they have a new substitute named Ms. Sherman. Cammi stayed up to late working on her latest assign...

  So, I never read the book that came before this one, which sucks because this one picks up where that one left off. Apparently, Nancy helped solve a mystery on a film set and wound up getting a role in the flick. Harold, the cheese shop owner, also got a job in the movie. It's all about the big Rackham robbery that happened during the 19 th century. See, the Rackham Gang stole money from Ethan Mahoney, who owned the blacksmith shop in town. They took the money he got from the railroad to build parts for them. He would up bankrupt, but his heirs later made a ton of money and became the richest people in town. The two Rackham boys had a sister, Esther, who tried to stop them before leaving town. Ethan confronted the guys and was then attacked by a wild cat. Esther found him and after nursing him back to health, they married and never talked about what happened. When the book picks up, Nancy is all super nervous about the job and worried about acting in front of other ...

  So this is one of the earlier books where Regina was still alive. Since coming back from Switzerland, all she can talk about is how much she loved it and how gorgeous everything was. When Liz hears about her experiences, she starts thinking that it would be the perfect place to study writing. Lucky for her, there's some fancy boarding school with a creating writing program. And even more luckily, they have a scholarship for girls exactly like her. In a poor attempt at being good parents, Ned and Alice decide not to tell her hell no right off the bat and instead wait for her to get more information. The packet comes in the mail with the news that she still has time to apply, not a ton of time but enough if she's willing to ignore everything else in her life. Can you see where this is going? This makes Liz decide that she should focus on nothing but herself in the coming weeks for once in her life (ha!). She constantly blows off Jeffrey, remember that poor guy? Thou...

  Nancy, Bess, and George are once again heading off on vacation. This time, it's Club High Adventure, some random ranch type place where they have a bunch of random activities. Marva, the woman who owns the place, asked Nancy for help when she began getting a series of suspicious letters and things start going wrong. Literally the day they get there, they witness a hang-gliding accident. Lisa, the guest, comes down hard and smacks her head on the ground. Gil, her instructor, checks her out and claims that she's fine but still calls for an ambulance, though he does take a few minutes to flirt with her. Nancy finds that especially weird when she discovers that he's engaged to Marva. Gil reveals that the hang-glider had a bent rod that looks like someone did it deliberately. Nancy starts her usual investigating and runs into “Uncle Al” who works for the club. He is super gruff like a Scooby Doo villain and tells her to basically mind her own business. She also ove...

  I don't know if there's anyone still out there. I like to think that there's at least one person breathlessly checking the blog daily and waiting for any sign of an update, but that's probably just me. So, how crazy has this last year been? COVID pretty much knocked me and millions of other people on our collective asses. I went from making jokes about Captain Trips that no one understood to realizing that this was pretty damn serious. As much as I wish I could blame the pandemic for my lack of posting, it's been more of a combination of things. 1 – My boyfriend went from a factory job with a good paycheck to landing on unemployment that took months to pay. At some point, they decided that he made too much and dropped his payments to $54/week. You try living on that! 2 – I became the breadwinner of the house just in time for my clients to start dropping like flies. It turns out that when there's a global pandemic, you don't really want to p...

According to the official book list, this is number 60 in the SVU series. I found it super confusing though because it mentions stuff that happened in the earlier books but not what happened later, as in Liz and Jess fighting over Sam and then her taking off to England. So, the book picks up with Liz moping over this guy Ben. He's supposedly a journalism major who was super into her until they actually went out on a date. She keeps waiting by the phone for him to call and feeling super pathetic about herself. That makes it all the worse when the twins' cousin Diane calls to talk to them about her upcoming wedding. Not only are they bridesmaids, but they're all staying at the same hotel together for the weekend. Jessica considers bringing some rando with her for the weekend, which makes Liz feel even worse. Cut to Liz whining over whether she should invite Ben or wait for him to call her. Guess which one she chooses? When he still doesn't call, she resign...

Mr. Crane, who is I guess their new teacher, brings in a bunch of musical instruments for the kids to play. After they try them all out, he announces that he's holding auditions to see who will play what in the St. Patrick's Day parade. Jessica becomes obsessed with the drum and think she's the best, but so does everyone else. Even Liz wants to play the drum. During auditions, Liz goes on the drum first and does great. Jess goes next and does horribly. She was so focused on the first song they played that she couldn't focus on the one in the audition. Their teacher asks her to try the flutophone, which she does a good job playing. Jess gets it, and Liz gets to be the little drummer girl. Since this is Jess though, she convinces Liz to switch parts with her. She really wants to lead the whole parade, which the drummer does. The twins dress as each other and even switch their name bracelets for class. Jessica does a really bad job with the drum, to the poi...