Trigger warnings should be on this book. The fat shaming game is strong. ( )

This is not one of my favourites. Sweet Valley High is often known for its dubious messages, but the message for this one is that, if you're overweight, you can stop people bullying you by eating rabbit food and losing a shedload of weight so that you, too, can be beautiful and popular. Ugh.

I think one of the other big issues here is that Robin isn't likeable to begin with, and she still isn't likeable after her personality change. It's just unlikeable in a different way.

The Lila subplot is good, though. Then again, any Lila plot is good :D I like that, for a change, the book doesn't talk as though everything's going to work out for her. Realism from Sweet Valley? Really?!

Moral of the story: Don't be fat!

[re-read: previously read around four times]

Key Characters: Elizabeth, Jessica, Robin, Lila

You called your own sister a snob on the internet!

So. Power Play.

It’s the first one so far that seems to be entirely rewritten, rather than simply updated. They had to do it this way, because in the new version, it’s not a sorority Robin is pledging. Jessica has created a new school club called “The Sweet Valley High Beautification Committee” or “The Beauties” for short. Robin, the fat girl who follows Jessica around, wants to join. Elizabeth encourages her to go for it, while Jessica first uses an old school bylaw to attempt to exclude Robin, then invents increasingly humiliating tasks for Robin to carry out in the hopes that if Robin won’t give up and go away they’ll all at least get a good laugh.

There are several issues with this one I’d like to address.

1) Jessica’s sociopathy rears its stylish head again. She is really, really mean here. Not just mean, but Machiavellian about it, repeatedly coming up with clever plans to humiliate and exclude this girl who has done nothing wrong other than be fat and want to be Jessica’s friend. Jessica’s social position requires her to pretend to be nice to Robin even as she’s plotting her downfall- Jessica is an utterly despicable person but she also cannot just say “Robin, go away”. That's considered completely unthinkable, then other people might have to acknowledge what a not nice person she is and for a girl, appearing "nice" is of the highest priority even if everyone around you can clearly see that you're not, in fact, nice at all. So she does everything else but come right out and say “Robin, you are not welcome here.” Those readers who are familiar with Jessica in SVT, SVK, SVJH, SVSY, UC and SVU as well as some of the later SVH books will be kinda shocked at just how awful she really is in these early ones. She'd be impossible to sympathize with if this book wasn't published right after "Playing with Fire".

Strange that it comes on the heels of her breakup with Bruce Patman, because we could be led to wonder what brings her to do this to someone else when she just escaped a semi abusive relationship. But she also brings up an interesting point about Elizabeth, which is totally true even if Jessica said it to throw blame away from herself.

2) Half of Robin’s problems in this book are not caused by Jessica but by Elizabeth. If Elizabeth had just told Robin the truth, “Look, Jessica isn’t your friend, has never been your friend and never will be your friend, stay away from her and I will not help you court her friendship” Jessica would have had a lot less power over Robin. Elizabeth spends more time helping Robin dance to Jessica’s tune than she does being an actual, you know, friend to Robin. Elizabeth keeps working behind the scenes to help Robin accomplish the tasks, which only encourages Robin to continue hoping Jessica will let her join The Beauties. Elizabeth even bribes Bruce to go to the dance with Robin, where he ridicules and dumps her in front of everyone. Elizabeth seems to care more about making sure Jess doesn’t “win” than she does about Robin’s emotional health. Robin actually points this out to Liz as well, that Elizabeth just made it all worse for her and calls both the twins liars who screwed with her.

3) The reader’s first thought is probably that Robin is pathetically clueless about Jessica and her friends. But I’ve been a teenage girl, and I’ve read this book and similar ones enough times to realize that this is not at all what’s going on. Robin knows full well that Jessica is not her friend. It doesn’t matter. In high school, you have to find your crowd and that doesn’t always mean it has to be made up of people you actually like all that much. It’s about having someone or a bunch of someones, to sit with at lunch and assemblies or on the bus during field trips, be your lab partner, let you in on the gossip, invite you to events, hook you up with dates/cigarettes/alcohol/drugs/couture/tickets, forge excuse notes, stand with you during the class photo, share a table at the prom and remember to invite you to the reunion. Without that, you can't successfully navigate your time there, even the teachers are reluctant to adjust their lesson plans and traditions so the lonely don't have to stand out quite so much. Whatever you do, you cannot let yourself be exposed as someone with no connections, it's like prison that way.

Both Jessica and Robin get how this works, it's Elizabeth who thinks high school friendships are only about actually *liking* your friends.

Robin decided of her own free will what kind of crowd she wanted to run with. Perhaps, no matter how nice Liz&Co are, Robin just wasn’t interested in the same hobbies as them, but then Elizabeth doesn't reach out to Robin nearly as much as she is convinced she did. And even though she knew Jessica had no respect for her, she didn’t exactly care. She just didn’t want to go through high school alone. So she thought she had to do it this way. Chances are, St. Elizabeth and her brainy friends were “nice” to Robin but didn’t exactly think about her much either.

It's Robin and Jessica who end up friends for the rest of the series, because Robin wanted to be a part of that crowd so badly that she was willing to go toe to toe with Jessica and not only survived but *thanks* her for being the catalyst to the positive changes in her life. Elizabeth just humored and enabled her because she pitied the fat girl.

Robin’s weight loss is rewritten to be more gradual than the original,and it’s emphasized that her health is the most important part. However, this strikes an awkward note when we remember that the twins have shrunk two sizes in these updates for no other reason than four is the new six. And that these books have a schizo approach to weight- fat people are fat because they eat too much but the fat characters eat no more than anyone else, the thin people of SV seem to survive on daily double portions of french fries, pizza, and ice cream and even with sports and working out they're not gonna be a size four without purging. But fat people are fat because they eat too much?

Updates: Robin’s outfit when she shows up to school fifteen pounds lighter. Tankinis, Chloe, Jamba Juice, Carl’s Jr (they also mention McDonald’s which is not an update but another substitution of a real place for the original made up one). Jessica is working out on an elliptical machine in their father’s office while listening to her Ipod instead of the original leg lifts and portable tape player. Instead of a nostalgic 50s “sockhop” it’s a 70’s themed dance- Bruce comes as Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever” and Robin comes as Tracy Turnblad from “Hairspray” (which this book mentions is from “another Travolta movie”). Allen and Robin go to see a “Tom Hanks retrospective”. When the original book came out, Tom Hanks hadn’t made enough films for a retrospective. He hadn’t made any. I’m not even sure he was on “Bosom Buddies” yet. ( )

If you want to get ahead in Sweet Valley, apparently it’s best to not be fat! Sadly, I remember being so enamored with this book as a chubby high school freshman.

That's because every chubby gal secretly wants to go away for the summer and come back hot and svelte so you can lord it over the entire boy’s baseball team. (Well, I also wanted to make out with Kirk Cameron, but that was before he started spouting off about how bananas are a religious miracle.)

I wonder how they’re going to re-do Robin in the new release of this book. If Jessica and Elizabeth had to be slimmed down to an better-than-perfect size 4, Robin might be *gasp* a size 8. That IS pretty heiferish. We really shouldn’t be promoting childhood obesity ( )

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