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Mar. 6th, 2015 03:37 pmGuess who caught another cold? Yes, yes, it's me. I don't know what the fuzzy happened as I was fine until Thursday when suddenly my body decided, "Oh, you have to go back to work? How about you sneeze like, fourteen times in a minute and then you can't breathe... but you'll think it's allergies until it's too late!"
Blergh. So far I've been lucky in that I just can't really breathe properly, but I'm also a little dizzy and fuzzy around the edges of my brain. Oh, there might be a fever or might have been one yesterday. It might've just been that yesterday was damn near 80 and today is maybe... 40 something?
In any case, I would like to nominate a book for worst in the entirety of the Sweet Valley franchise (not counting SVC that does not exist, ok?).
Sweet Valley Twins: The Twins Take Paris. When I'm feeling better and less fuzzy I might actually go hunt down the cover(s) and pick this sucker apart in a semi rational way, but for now we'll go with this:
I picked it off the shelf because when I'm sick I like fluffy reads and you'd be hard pressed to find something fluffier than the pre-teen adventures of Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield (and their friends). This time the twins are going to Paris for their spring break! Wait, didn't they do that in SVH and make a big deal about it being their first time in France? Pfft, who cares for continuity when you can ship the girls off to a foreign country that Francine Pascal loves perhaps a little too much!
Just before the girls are set to leave, they get a letter from their host family explaining that they must go to Nice to take care of their ailing grandmother but that they've found a suitable replacement, a window woman who is a fiend.
Because of course their English is worse than the Americans' French, right? Right. Madame du Noir is actually a widow woman who is a friend because duh.
The girls are sent off to France and while on the plane, Jessica finds an article about missing girls who look just like the twins... and there's a picture of the woman they're last seen with. Who is a little old lady (who can't be that little) with a black and white polka dot scarf. Because the picture is in black and white.
Both girls dream of Madame du Noir being an awful fiend and when they see her outside the airport, they run away because Elizabeth overhears her saying something possibly scary. Something about them never going home, maybe? I dunno, there's a running theme in this book where Elizabeth is left to translate and does a piss poor job because she's 12 and not fluent in the language but instead of using the brains that the older twin is supposed to possess in this series, she's just as fucking stupid as Ellen would be. (Ellen Riteman is one of those characters who had better be listed under Too Stupid to Live on tvtropes)
So the girls are on the run because their hostess is totally the woman going around making young blonde americans disappear (someone let Margo know that someone is totally doing her job for her), right? It takes them more than 24 hours to realize maybe they should fucking call home if they honestly think their hostess is a murderer.
To make this a little shorter the girls galavant around Paris and keep running into Madame because she's not stupid. She figures that the girls are most likely to be found in the place least likely for someone to look for them (in Jessica's case that would be the Louvre but honestly it's the first place I would look for Elizabeth) and she also calls their parents as soon as she realizes the girls have clearly lost their damn minds.
The Wakefields fly to France (must be nice) to look for the girls and Steven is also pretty damn stupid.
Anyway, the twins keep running across Madame and misunderstanding things. Like when they realize maybe they're being incredibly stupid and go to her apartment, they overhear her talking about cooking them and putting them under glass. Clearly she's talking about a meal of some sort but the twins are like, "Oh shit, she's going to cook us and put us under glass!"
WTF, Elizabeth Wakefield? I expect this fuckery from your sister because she's pretty damn imaginative but you, you are supposed to be the sane one unless there's supernatural stuff going on. You're better than this! You should be able to figure out the woman is talking about FOOD and you are not food.
Ugh. This happens. A lot. Somehow they never catch on to the fact that their parents are with Madame and Steven sees the girls but never thinks to holler after them as he chases them around Paris and then, then he can't understand why his parents are freaking out when their remaining child goes MIA, too.
Oi.
So the girls run into another old lady who... has a mustache. But in a shocking display of ... something, Elizabeth tells Jessica not to be so judgey because sometimes little old ladies start to grow whiskers, have some damn compassion.
Where was this ability to think earlier in the book? I mean really.
Yeah, turns out Madame #2 is the bad guy and Madame du Noir and Steven totally realize this because, and I cannot believe I'm about to say this, but the cops knew full well who the bad guy was they just... never did anything about it? I mean, wtf? If you know this dude/lady/person is going around butchering people and you know their name and where they live, maybe you should do something about it? JESUS.
There's a purse whacking to the head at the Eiffel Tower and yes, you read that correctly. The girls are like, "tralala, wasn't this just the funniest thing ever?" and their parents are less than amused. "Your asses are going right back home as soon as we can get a flight that doesn't go through Seoul and Sydney and then it's nothing but chores because you two are too stupid to live!"
I mean, SV isn't known for it's more logical moments but this whole book is one stupid thing after the next. The smartest thing in the whole damn book is Jessica wanting to make her own phrase book full of useless sayings instead of "The purple pen belongs to my mother's brother."
Sooooooo, yeah. Skip this one. It's really, really stupid. Which is a shame because it was put out around the same time the SVT series went to creepyville for the Beast arc and that, I think, is within spitting distance of the Evil Elizabeth book which is still the creepiest cover of a SV book EVER. So whichever ghostie authored this? I hope you catch two colds back to back.
You suck.
Blergh. So far I've been lucky in that I just can't really breathe properly, but I'm also a little dizzy and fuzzy around the edges of my brain. Oh, there might be a fever or might have been one yesterday. It might've just been that yesterday was damn near 80 and today is maybe... 40 something?
In any case, I would like to nominate a book for worst in the entirety of the Sweet Valley franchise (not counting SVC that does not exist, ok?).
Sweet Valley Twins: The Twins Take Paris. When I'm feeling better and less fuzzy I might actually go hunt down the cover(s) and pick this sucker apart in a semi rational way, but for now we'll go with this:
I picked it off the shelf because when I'm sick I like fluffy reads and you'd be hard pressed to find something fluffier than the pre-teen adventures of Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield (and their friends). This time the twins are going to Paris for their spring break! Wait, didn't they do that in SVH and make a big deal about it being their first time in France? Pfft, who cares for continuity when you can ship the girls off to a foreign country that Francine Pascal loves perhaps a little too much!
Just before the girls are set to leave, they get a letter from their host family explaining that they must go to Nice to take care of their ailing grandmother but that they've found a suitable replacement, a window woman who is a fiend.
Because of course their English is worse than the Americans' French, right? Right. Madame du Noir is actually a widow woman who is a friend because duh.
The girls are sent off to France and while on the plane, Jessica finds an article about missing girls who look just like the twins... and there's a picture of the woman they're last seen with. Who is a little old lady (who can't be that little) with a black and white polka dot scarf. Because the picture is in black and white.
Both girls dream of Madame du Noir being an awful fiend and when they see her outside the airport, they run away because Elizabeth overhears her saying something possibly scary. Something about them never going home, maybe? I dunno, there's a running theme in this book where Elizabeth is left to translate and does a piss poor job because she's 12 and not fluent in the language but instead of using the brains that the older twin is supposed to possess in this series, she's just as fucking stupid as Ellen would be. (Ellen Riteman is one of those characters who had better be listed under Too Stupid to Live on tvtropes)
So the girls are on the run because their hostess is totally the woman going around making young blonde americans disappear (someone let Margo know that someone is totally doing her job for her), right? It takes them more than 24 hours to realize maybe they should fucking call home if they honestly think their hostess is a murderer.
To make this a little shorter the girls galavant around Paris and keep running into Madame because she's not stupid. She figures that the girls are most likely to be found in the place least likely for someone to look for them (in Jessica's case that would be the Louvre but honestly it's the first place I would look for Elizabeth) and she also calls their parents as soon as she realizes the girls have clearly lost their damn minds.
The Wakefields fly to France (must be nice) to look for the girls and Steven is also pretty damn stupid.
Anyway, the twins keep running across Madame and misunderstanding things. Like when they realize maybe they're being incredibly stupid and go to her apartment, they overhear her talking about cooking them and putting them under glass. Clearly she's talking about a meal of some sort but the twins are like, "Oh shit, she's going to cook us and put us under glass!"
WTF, Elizabeth Wakefield? I expect this fuckery from your sister because she's pretty damn imaginative but you, you are supposed to be the sane one unless there's supernatural stuff going on. You're better than this! You should be able to figure out the woman is talking about FOOD and you are not food.
Ugh. This happens. A lot. Somehow they never catch on to the fact that their parents are with Madame and Steven sees the girls but never thinks to holler after them as he chases them around Paris and then, then he can't understand why his parents are freaking out when their remaining child goes MIA, too.
Oi.
So the girls run into another old lady who... has a mustache. But in a shocking display of ... something, Elizabeth tells Jessica not to be so judgey because sometimes little old ladies start to grow whiskers, have some damn compassion.
Where was this ability to think earlier in the book? I mean really.
Yeah, turns out Madame #2 is the bad guy and Madame du Noir and Steven totally realize this because, and I cannot believe I'm about to say this, but the cops knew full well who the bad guy was they just... never did anything about it? I mean, wtf? If you know this dude/lady/person is going around butchering people and you know their name and where they live, maybe you should do something about it? JESUS.
There's a purse whacking to the head at the Eiffel Tower and yes, you read that correctly. The girls are like, "tralala, wasn't this just the funniest thing ever?" and their parents are less than amused. "Your asses are going right back home as soon as we can get a flight that doesn't go through Seoul and Sydney and then it's nothing but chores because you two are too stupid to live!"
I mean, SV isn't known for it's more logical moments but this whole book is one stupid thing after the next. The smartest thing in the whole damn book is Jessica wanting to make her own phrase book full of useless sayings instead of "The purple pen belongs to my mother's brother."
Sooooooo, yeah. Skip this one. It's really, really stupid. Which is a shame because it was put out around the same time the SVT series went to creepyville for the Beast arc and that, I think, is within spitting distance of the Evil Elizabeth book which is still the creepiest cover of a SV book EVER. So whichever ghostie authored this? I hope you catch two colds back to back.
You suck.