Double Love

"Yes, this is the definition of YA trash, and no, I’m not apologizing for it. I read this book at least twenty times as a tween and it likely unlocks the key to my psyche. The inaugural volume in a series that ran from 1983-2003, it introduces us to Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield, a pair of impossibly beautiful sixteen-year-old twins who dominate the social scene in equally perfect suburban California. With the subtlety of a cheerleading squad, the series enacts a standard move in stories about twins by starring a pair of highly binarized personalities. Liz is the Good (read: vanilla) Twin: a prim, long-suffering bore of a superego. Jessica is the Evil (read: smoking hot) Twin: a narcissistic fireball of id. Every girl in my elementary school obsessively aligned herself with either Jessica or Elizabeth. (Team Liz for the win!) This habit of dumping twins—and humans in general—into sharply opposed camps is regrettable, but it has its uses too. The Sweet Valley series is a junior instance of what many more sophisticated stories do for us later in life: they animate contrasting, maybe incompatible, ways of being that we can try out ourselves, ideally with a little more finesse."