I come to bury Sweet Valley Confidential, not praise it: the last rites of this godforsaken book

1) I was right: the fight at Grandmommy's--siiiiiiiiigh, the Wakefields are one of those families?--was not particularly interesting or surprising:
a) Liam the Black Irish Bartender was instantly enamored with Jessica (his excuse for not being all over Elizabeth? "Pheremones." That means dudes are animals who can sense when a female member of the human race won't put out, Elizabeth) and made a big show of being all up in her grill.
b) Todd, in a bit of emoting that made zero logical sense, flipped the fuck out and accused Jessica of running off with Liam at some point to tongue-kiss him.
c) Bruce Patman was there. Because...he's...there's...I don't know.
d) Everyone starts yelling at everyone right out of a scene from a wacky-yet-touching family Thanksgiving movie.
e) Alice Wakefield yells, "Ned, bring out the fucking cake!"

e) is the best thing because it actually reads like something a frustrated mom would do when her adult children were acting like a bunch of well-groomed monkeys who had learned language from General Hospital.

2) Then Elizabeth returns home to NYC and, in short order, takes up with Will the Angry Young Playwright as "friends with benefits."

3) Then the play opens and Will's estranged fiancee comes along with Thurston Howell and Lovey, Will's parents.

4) Then Will is in love with his estranged fiancee and Elizabeth knows that their friendship with the benefits of sex has come to a close, 24 hours after it began.

I'll take a break here, because I know you're puzzled. Me too! I was going to launch into how maybe as a girl who doesn't engage in the "friends with benefits" game, perhaps I don't understand how it works. But I think it's less that the "friends with benefits" thing is puzzling and more that every single step of this was so accelerated, like reading Ikea directions as fast as possible, only instead of building affordable Swedish crap, it's an author shouting out the elements of a romance plot. "Okay! So! First Elizabeth is mad! Then she leaves for New York! Be sure not to forget that Bruce is her best friend and looks at her adoringly! Okay! She lands in New York! Makes up with Will! He bones her! The play opens! Oh! His fiancee is there! And scene!"

Using the allen wrench, put screw into whatever like diagram A. Got it.

Yikes. Pacing would be helpful, FP. Or genuine interaction betwixt characters not dictated by the iron-clad structure of the plot. Something, Francine. Give me something.

5) Jessica shows up, sleeping up against Elizabeth's door like a wino. She has left Todd because of that fight about Liam and is ready to make amends. At first Elizabeth maintains her icy composure, but because time's a-wasting, and a reconciliation needs to happen nowrightnowthere'sonly32pageslefthurryhurryhurry, Elizabeth then changes her mind or her heart grows three sizes like the Grinch or she has a breakthrough and all her various personalities join the host personality (Sybil!) and then boom, reunited, and it feels so good.

6) Then Todd shows up, hanging out outside the apartment building.

Okay, the whole feel of that sequence was like in Sleepless in Seattle, when we all get to follow Jonah and Sam and Annie as they cross the entire country on their way to and from each other. Dotdotdotdotdot I'm here! It's like these people have never struggled to get the exact right price at Orbitz before. How do they all make travel plans so easily? Oh, that's right: loveeeeeeebarf.

7) Jessica and Todd make up in one of those cute-only-the-movies way of saying "I'm sorry" and "I love you" at the same time.

8) Then everyone is happy and going to go to Jessica and Todd's wedding wheeeeee!

9) So Elizabeth is back in Sweet Valley, and in a turn of events, it turns out Winston Egbert faked his death in order to elude the authorities, who were closing in on him as a suspect for a string of serial rape/murders, but he's alive and living in the basement of the Sweet Valley Country Club, and he kidnaps Elizabeth! Good thing the team from Criminal Minds flies out to sunny CA and, using psychology and science, they locate her just in time. Then that girl with the cat-eye glasses says something saucy and Shemar Moore's shirt falls off.

Sorry, fell down a procedural hole there.

The for-real 9) is that Bruce calls Elizabeth to his house, pours her favorite obscure wine, and tells her he's moving to New York to be with the woman he loves. Because this book is a series of moments wherein people have a-ha! moments at convenient times, Elizabeth is all, "Ohmigod, I love Josh! I mean, Bruce!" and is having a mental meltdown about losing her friendship that also has the side effect of making her a fucking ninnyhammer.

10) So Bruce basically says, "Elizabeth, you ninnyhammer, I'm in love with you! Haven't you noticed the way I've mooned after you since my character was reintroduced? No? You're a ninnyhammer? Okay!"

11) Then they Do It. And it is amazing.

Prime selections follow in bold:

"But this kiss was no silly romantic nonsense. It was real! And it was wild!" (Well, the exclamation points certainly have me convinced. How's about you?)

"It reverberated right through her whole body. Before she knew it, Elizabeth threw her arms around Bruce as if she had just returned from a million years away from the man she loved." (Yes. No silly romantic nonsense. Right.)

"At last Bruce had the love of his life in his arms, the unattainable woman he had adored for ten years, the woman he watched loving someone else. He'd known their love was wrong, but he couldn't tell her the truth because..." (Oh, God, shut it, Patman, and just fuck her already.)

"They were both overcome, out of breath."

Why does everything related to love or sex in this book make the characters sound like they are suffering from some kind of terminal disease? And not, like, in the cool way where the guy writes poetry and then dies, making a bumper sticker slogan also stand for Paul Strobe, I Love You.

"Bruce stood up and held out his hand. And as she did ten years ago in that hospital waiting room, Elizabeth slipped her hand into his. Together they walked up the steps to his bedroom.

Once there, they just held each other..."


Bo-ring.


"....Then Bruce put his hands on her shoulders and moved her back slightly, only far enough to see her completely. To make certain she was absolutely there.

Gently, he unbuttoned her silk blouse. She didn't move. He slid it down over her shoulders, deftly unhooking her bra and allowing her breasts, with their taut nipples, to be free. He just stared at her, drinking in the sight of the flesh and blood of years of longing. Still she didn't move, waiting for him to slip her skirt and th-th-thong-tha-thong-thong-thong down over her hips and reveal her total nakedness to him."


Is anyone else creeped out by the way Elizabeth is standing like a statue? I saw a totally ucky French film once, called The Piano Teacher, and in the climatic scene, the title character initiates her rape fantasy with her boyfriend by lying stock still, seemingly unwilling, while he has sex with her. It was one of the most upsetting things I've ever seen in a film. So thanks, Francine Pascal, for making me flash back on all that.

Also: of course she's wearing a silk blouse that is slid down over her shoulders. It's like I fell back into a pile of the Silhouette novels I read in my early teen years.

"With the excitement of standing in front of this man, whom she had known so long from the distance of friendship, of being completely exposed to him, it took all her willpower to keep from closing the space between them and feeling the heat of his body against hers.

But now it was her turn. Elizabeth reached out and began to unbutton Bruce's shirt. She moved her hands to his belt, unzipped his pants, and with a gentle push, allowed them to drop to the floor, exposed his smooth, almost sculpted body and his desire for her."


I was telling Kristen that the way this sex scene played out was like a literary imagining of what it was like when you were eight or nine years old and you stripped your Barbie and Ken naked and made them kiss and sort of collide into each other. You were certain that plastic naked colliding was something, but you just didn't have all the facts, and you were years away from reading Flowers in the Attic and the filthy parts of your mom's copy of Joan Collins's Sins.

This is plastic naked colliding, right down to the "smooth, almost sculpted body." His desire for her is, like, a philosophical, half-imagined concept, not an actual engorged penis. Just FYI.

"Bruce let his shirt drop from his arms, kicked his legs free of the clothes, and took his love in his arms, pressing so hard he feared he would break her, but he couldn't stop himself and she didn't break. Together, they fell to the bed.

When they made love, it was completely loving, full of such deep tenderness that the passion almost played second to the adoration."

1) Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...what?
2) [plastic colliding, plastic colliding]

"But the passion was there, and once the love had been established, the excitement took over and spun them out into the wild reaches of the glorious.

At last Elizabeth knew the splendid, the marvelous, the amazing, the spectacular!

The over the top!"

I honestly don't even know what happened here. I feel like instead of two characters having sex, Francine is shaking a thesaurus upside-down and just letting adjectives fall onto the page.
***
To wrap this all up, I think it's important that you know the music selections for Jessica and Todd's wedding:
a) The flower girls walked down the aisle to this, apparently.
b) A "melange of Beatles' music" (which, I hope, included "Rocky Raccoon" and "Octopus's Garden")
c) Jessica (the piece de resistance) walked down the aisle in a "strapless sequined" gown to "All I Ask of You" from Phantom of the Opera.

So even though Francine made every effort to mention TwitterGiggle and Bookface and all the other bells and whistles of our technological age, Jessica and Todd still took a time machine back to 1988 to get married. Awesome.

There's a coda to the book, much like the end of American Graffiti, where you get to know what's happening with some of the tertiary characters, but it's certainly not the wild reaches of glorious, so who cares, right?

Heck, let's read it one more time:
"But the passion was there, and once the love had been established, the excitement took over and spun them out into the wild reaches of the glorious.

At last Elizabeth knew the splendid, the marvelous, the amazing, the spectacular!

The over the top!"

Good night, and good luck. May flights of angels collide your body with that of a naked Ken doll. We out.