Sweet Valley High
Identical twins Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield, a sunny California suburb, and 181 paperbacks of romance, scheming and the occasional earthquake. Francine Pascal's ghostwritten empire sold more than 200 million copies between 1983 and 2003 and became a syndicated TV series starring real twins in 1994.
Francine Pascal was a former soap-opera writer — she and her husband John wrote for The Young Marrieds, and she co-wrote the Broadway musical George M! with her brother Michael Stewart — who wanted to create a soap of her own and couldn't find the idea. A friend in publishing suggested a series aimed at teenagers. Bantam bought it on a six-page proposal and published the first three titles, Double Love, Secrets and Playing with Fire, in the fall of 1983. In the opener Elizabeth falls for Todd Wilkins and Jessica sets out to take him, and the rivalry that powered the next two decades was in place.
Pascal wrote the earliest books herself, then presided over a team of ghostwriters. In 1985 Perfect Summer, the first Sweet Valley High super edition, became the first young-adult novel to land on the New York Times bestseller list. Spin-offs followed the twins in both directions: Sweet Valley Twins (sixth grade), Sweet Valley Kids (second grade), The Unicorn Club, Sweet Valley Junior High, Senior Year and Sweet Valley University, plus a board game, puzzles, dolls and a Slam Book.
The television version, Francine Pascal's Sweet Valley High, ran 88 episodes from September 1994 to October 1997 from Saban Entertainment, with Brittany and Cynthia Daniel — real twins and former Doublemint girls — as Jessica and Elizabeth; the sisters also modeled for later book covers. It spent three seasons in syndication, mostly on Fox stations, before UPN used the fourth to launch its teen lineup in September 1997, and it played the material far more for laughs than the books did.
The numbered run ended in 1998 with book 143, Party Weekend — 181 books counting the super editions, thrillers and magna editions — and the Senior Year continuation carried the twins to 2003. Pascal returned in 2011 with Sweet Valley Confidential, set ten years on and written entirely by her; critics were harsh (Entertainment Weekly: "a very bad book") and fans catalogued its continuity errors. A CW reboot was reported in 2021 and had not been made as of 2024. Pascal died in July 2024 at 92.
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