So Long Francine Pascal, the Woman Whose Books I Did Judge by Their Covers

I was not blonde. I didn’t have petite, doll-like features. Pastels didn’t dominate my wardrobe, and I most certainly did not have boys constantly angling for my attention. Which is all to say that my adolescent years didn’t remotely mirror the ones portrayed in Sweet Valley High, the best-selling YA series (the books and its spin-offs have sold more than 200 million copies) by author Francine Pascal, who passed away yesterday at age 92. If you came of age in the 1980s or ’90s, it didn’t matter whether you saw yourself in Elizabeth or Jessica Wakefield, whether you were an avid reader or, like me, a more reluctant one, their influence was undeniable and unavoidable.

Before Pascal, who was born Francine Paula Rubin and grew up in Queens, became a household name among tween and teen readers, she was a magazine journalist (writing for publications like Ladies’ Home Journal and Cosmopolitan) and a script writer for soap operas. The influence of her former career is clear on the pages of Sweet Valley High, which were rife with secrets and drama and plot twists. She started writing young-adult novels in the late ’70s, but it wasn’t until a friend relayed a conversation with an editor who had asked why there was no teenage version of Dallas that the idea for Sweet Valley took root. Pascal told Entertainment Weekly in 2019: “I sat down, and I wrote a [character] bible and the first 12 [SVH] stories. It went quickly because it was such a fertile idea. Bantam Books loved it. They ordered all 12.”

Despite never having been to Southern California, Pascal’s books (there are 181 total in the original series, many written by ghostwriters) offered an intricate lens on the semi-charmed West Coast life of the Wakefield sisters, identical twins living in a suburb of Los Angeles. In the first, Double Love from 1983, the girls are introduced to readers (as they are in many of the books to follow):

Both girls had the same shoulder-length, sun-streaked blonde hair, the same sparkling blue-green eyes, the same perfect skin. Even the tiny dimple in Elizabeth’s left cheek was duplicated in her younger sister’s—younger by four minutes. Both girls were five feet six on the button and generously blessed with spectacular, all-American good looks. Both wore exactly the same size clothes, but they refused to dress alike, except for the exquisite identical lavalieres they wore on gold chains around their necks. The lavalieres had been presents from their parents on their sixteenth birthday. The only way you could tell them apart was by the tiny beauty mark on Elizabeth’s right shoulder.

There was, as mentioned, melodrama. There were boys to obsess and fight over. Can Elizabeth survive the heartache of losing Todd? Will Jessica break Bill’s heart too? Jessica and Lila are in love with the same boy! There were schemes and secrets. Will Elizabeth be forced to choose between Amy and Enid? Somehow Jessica will get rid of Betsy. And, naturally, incidents of soap-operatic proportions that were laid out in the titles (and their exclamation points) alone: Hostage!, Crash Landing!, Kidnapped!

While the buttoned-up moral lessons about drugs and hooking up may have aged poorly, the world Pascal painted still has a nostalgic appeal. That appeal will forever be exemplified by the book’s original covers, which were all drawn by the late artist James L. Mathewuse. (Nancy Drew is also his handiwork.) Mathewuse’s illustrations were the perfect visual entry point to Sweet Valley: soft-focus pastel drawings of girls clad in striped polo shirts and blazers with shoulder pads and silky button-downs, their emotional peaks and valleys (jealousy, despair, lust) immortalized underneath the banner of cherry red varsity lettering.

In YA circles, Pascal is legend material. After creating her Sweet Valley bible, Pascal handed off actual writing duties so she had time to broaden her reach. Anyone else remember the Sweet Valley High board game where you had to vie for the prom dress and the date? What about the ‘90s-era TV show with its own golden-haired twin Wakefield sisters?

Pascal also carved a path for YA writers to follow. Would we have had Ann M. Martin’s Baby-Sitters Club or Cecily Brooke von Ziegesar’s Gossip Girl without her? These were juggernauts of the preteen library that helped define a certain vision of girlhood in the ’90s and the aughts.

I didn’t see myself in Sweet Valley, but that was okay. In some ways, figuring out what you want to push against when you’re growing up is as important as figuring out what you aspire to. And culture needs things to push against as well; would there have been grunge without the saccharine scenes of cultural entities like Sweet Valley High? Decades later, I would feel a similar sense of otherness watching Sex and the City, which reflected none of my own New York reality. The appeal, for me, was the lens into a rose-tinted world of delightful drama that was entirely unlike my own. That kind of escapist appeal was, like, totally awesome.