Corngrats!

That's great, brina; love the name! This is a really good idea.

Yay! Thanks, guys. Send readers and stuff my way. :)

shamless? i really need to get more sleep. EDITOR, please?

Well it is shamless. The blog. No sham. I like. :)

So would this be the correct place to complain about the "updated" Sweet Valley High books? Because good lord, they're just wrong.

Not that I've been reading them, of course. Because even when I regress and start rereading YA literature, it is of course only the high-brow YA literature that I dip into. Mmm hmm.

It is wrong! Wrong wrong wrong! I'll pick one up and browse to see just how wrong when I have the chance, though.

Congrats and good luck on the new blog!

Reading YA literature is so not regressing. Is anyone out in the adult lit world doing things as insightful as E. Lockhart, or as innovative as Scott Westerfeld, or as lucrative as Gossip Girl? No. Just, no.

But I did get a copy of Double Love, the revised version. Sadly, it is not revised enough to make it worth reading. It's got all the 80s morality and none of the 80s awesomeness. Remember that one book where Jessica put on a pair of jeans and then sat down in a tub full of hot water so they would shrink onto her skin? Yeah, I did that, just to see if it would work, when I was ten.

No one but no one will be taking fashion advice from these new and improved Wakefield twins. Besides which, the people doing the rewrites ... I mean, Francine Pascal ... umm ... seems to have lost her edge. Something.

Thanks again, everyone.

::mutters to self. shamless. are you retarded, brina?::

Reading YA lit is certainly not *always* regressing, but it most often is when I do it. :-)

Some of the SVH updates don't even make any sense. Rather than going to the ice cream shop thingy, they go to a taco place. What on earth is the point of that change? And the random slang or modern tv references just seem totally tacked on.

My favorite comment about it was from Wendy at Pound:

I know how codgery this makes me sound, but, ahem, back in my day I found my way around all manner of inexplicable details in Judy Blume books (who “sets” their hair? why does everyone wear hats and live in New Jersey?) while still managing to relate to the characters and the stories.

Ever since reading that line, I keep thinking to myself, in times of great confusion, "Why does everyone wear hats and live in New Jersey?"

Occhi, when I was a very little kid I had that same problem with the Ramona books. Like, "What is this blueing of which she speaks? Blue hair? Grandmas have blue hair? I've never seen that."

But I still got it. Besides which, the Sweet Valley books have "updated" fashions and so forth, but not updated moral values. Seriously. In a post Gossip Girl era, in a time when naughty words and things like S-E-X are discussed in teen lit, I don't know who they expect to read these "new and improved" versions of the Sweet Valley franchise.

heh. I didn't notice your "shamless" note. I'm keeping it though, because I want to make fun of you in the future. Or maybe right now.

"Shamless"! Hahaha, brina, you're such a doofus!