**This blog contains adult language.**
Warning: Spoilers ahead!!! This is a recap blog which means I read the book and tell you everything that happens so you don't have to read it yourself. Do NOT continue to read unless you want to know what cold-hearted-bitch move the twins made this book.
From the Back of the Book: A senseless tragedy... Sweet Valley is stunned by the news: Beautiful young Elizabeth Wakefield lies in a coma, on the brink of death after a horrible motorcycle accident. Elizabeth's boyfriend Todd is consumed by guilt; he was driving and escaped unharmed. He feels totally helpless. All he can do is wait for a change in Elizabeth's condition - a change that might mean the loss of the only girl he's ever loved. But no one is more shattered than Elizabeth's twin, Jessica. As she keeps watch over the silent body of her sister, she's overwhelmed by despair. Without Elizabeth, can life go on?
TRIGGER WARNING: There is an attempted assault in this book. I will not be describing it in detail but if it's something that will harm you in any way, please skip this blog.
This book was published in 1984 and I've never read it before. The cover is pretty meh but I can't really find anything to make fun of, so we'll just move on.
Meet the Cast
*Elizabeth Wakefield – identical twin of Jessica and massive fucking martyr.
*Jessica Wakefield – identical twin of Elizabeth with narcissistic and histrionic tendencies
*Ned Wakefield – neglectful patriarch of the clan and successful lawyer
*Alice Wakefield – neglectful matriarch of the clan and an interior designer
*Steven Wakefield – older brother, university student and general asshole
*Enid Rollins – Liz's best friend and generic good-girl type
*Todd Wilkins – Liz's douchebag boyfriend and star of the SVH basketball team
*Lila Fowler – Jessica's self-absorbed best friend and representative of SV new money
*Bruce Patman – school dick and representative of SV old money
*Ken Matthews – star quarterback and resident jock stereotype
*Winston Egbert – stereotypical school nerd
There are more but these are the main characters that plague us book after book.
In the last book, Todd got a motorcycle that Liz was forbidden to ride because her cousin was killed in a motorcycle accident. Liz fretted a bunch because Todd was giving rides to other girls. He finally decided to sell it since it was causing them issues and she decided she wanted to take one forbidden ride before he did. They were hit by a drunk driver and Liz, who was not wearing a helmet, was severely injured and finished up the book in a coma.
We start out with Jess in Liz's hospital room. She's understandably upset that Liz is still in the coma and she feels like everyone is lying to her when they tell her Liz will be fine. Suddenly a doctor in a white lab coat is in the room. He puts his hand on Jess's shoulder and tells her how beautiful she is. It feels a little creepy. I mean, the hand could just be comforting but when you add it to him telling her how attractive she is, it feels very wrong. Anyway, this is the neurosurgeon Dr Edwards. He tells her that medicine has it's limitations and that she should talk to Liz and give her the will to live.
Jess is scared that Liz might die, so she starts going over the events of the night of the accident out loud for her. Except she's going over parts she wasn't even there for. I know Pascal is trying to review for us but this doesn't make sense. She's describing how Liz felt when Todd showed up with the bike and what made her get on and Jess simply has no way to know any of that. Then she reviews the first six books out loud as well and it's just as riveting as you'd expect. Naturally it works and Liz wakes up. I think she woke up to tell Jess she didn't need the review The neurosurgeon says her recovery is 100% due to Jessica talking to Liz and they all praise her.
This is already fucking ridiculous and it's only page 12.
It's immediately apparent that Liz is a little different after her very long sleep. She's super worried about her appearance and has Jess apply four inches of makeup to her face. Then she asks for something sexy to wear instead of the hospital gown. Jess is confused. She helps Liz get ready for a visit from Todd but Liz doesn't seem to happy about it. In fact, she pretty much gives him the cold shoulder when he arrives and tells him she's much too tired for company. He leaves feeling dejected.
Liz stays in the hospital for three weeks and then she's released with orders to stay home from school for two more weeks and rest. Even though we just skipped ahead 21 days, we immediately skip ahead 5 more. Liz is bored with bed rest and she doesn't want to read or do her homework or talk to any of her old friends. She tells Jess that she wants to have a party and Jess reminds her that she has one more week of rest before their parents will even consider it. Liz relents but says she wants to have a pool party with lots of boys as soon as she's out on “parole”. Jess is a little confused because Liz has a boyfriend but she ignores it because she's just so happy to have Liz alive.
Todd comes by but Liz refuses to see him. She asks Jess to tell him that she's sleeping and she can't have visitors. Todd is really concerned. He says he'll come back the next day but Jess tells him he should wait until Liz is able to go back to school. He asks her if Liz ever asks for him and Jess just tells him Liz has been concentrating on healing and hasn't really asked for anyone. Todd leaves, dejected again.
We take another hop to the next week and the first day that Liz is allowed to go back to school. She's wearing a green minidress which is something that she normally wouldn't wear to school. In contrast, Jess is wearing jeans and a t-shirt which isn't really typical for her either. Pascal doesn't bother to explain the wardrobe switch up at all. Of course, when they get to school, everyone keeps confusing them for each other. Liz goes to the Oracle room and does some light flirting with the borderline-inappropriate Mr Collins and then breezes off to her classes.
We skip again to the end of the week. Pascal, this is seriously getting ridiculous. It's the day of the pool party. The neglectful parents are out as usual and Jess and Liz are supposed to be setting things up. Liz runs off to the mall leaving all the work to Jess. Jess is bitter and annoyed but still so grateful that Liz is okay that she lets it slide.
Liz returns, puts on a teeny bikini and turns into the life of the party. Todd and Jess sit together on the sidelines and watch Liz work the crowd. She's doing a lot of flirting with Ken. Both Todd and Cara talk to Jess about how different Liz seems but it just makes Jess mad. She doesn't want to admit that Liz has changed since her injury. As the party progresses, however, she comes around and realizes that Liz is different now and it's forcing Jess to be different too. She ends up working the entire party to make sure food and drinks are restocked and everyone is having a good time. It's a job that Liz usually does and Jess isn't blind to that fact.
When the party ends, Liz suddenly comes down with a 'headache' and has to lay down. Jess thinks that Liz just doesn't want to clean up but then feels bad for thinking that. In the back of her mind, however, Jess is worried that Liz might have changed into her.
We skip ahead again. I don't know how far but it's a school day and it hasn't been a good one for Jess. Liz also has a bad day because she really isn't doing any homework or studying and it's starting to catch up with her. At dinner, Alice announces that they'll have houseguests for awhile. Some friends of theirs are jetting off to Europe (Pascal, this isn't Point Horror) and Ned and Alice will be babysitting their 12 year old twins, Jean and Joan. I have no idea why any sane person would ask Ned and Alice to babysit. They barely take care of their own children. Liz is pissed off and makes some comment about not wanting the little twerps around which surprises her parents. Jess rushes to cover the incident up so her parents won't think anything is wrong which is the exact opposite of what she should be doing. She should be telling her parents that Liz is acting weird.
Maybe she knows that Ned and Alice simply wouldn't care.
Sure enough, on their first night there, Ned and Alice leave to play bridge. Jess confirms with Liz that she'll be home because Jess has a date with that Danny guy from last book. They're going to the drive in and Jess makes a special point of the fact that Danny's front seat pushes back and reclines so I guess she's not planning to actually watch the movie. Liz agrees to watch the twins but then gets ready really fast and leaves the house before Jess can. Jess is too busy congratulating herself on losing 2 pounds so she doesn't look like a “blimpo” to notice. Again with this, Pascal?
Jess is infuriated when she finds out that Liz stuck her with Jean and Joan. Danny arrives and he's equally annoyed. He tells Jess that the date is off and starts to leave but she stops him. She doesn't want to be stuck at home with the twins with nothing to do. She tells him she'll make it up to him any way he wants and he agrees to take the twins to the drive in with them.
Did.....did Jess just promise some kind of sexual favor to Danny? Because it feels like she just promised some kind of sexual favor to Danny.
The next week, the guidance calls Liz in because she hasn't done any of her makeup work from when she was in the coma/hospital. Liz lies and says that the stress of studying makes her dizzy and her doctor wants her to take it easy and not worry about schoolwork for awhile. The GC seems to buy that explanation for some reason. She must not be very good at her job. When I went to school you had to have a doctor's note to get away with crap like that.
Liz somehow flirts her way into getting Winston's history term paper from him. She tells him she just wants to look it over but it's pretty clear she wants to copy it. She goes to the Oracle office and borderline-inappropriate Mr Collins tells her that she's in danger of being kicked off the paper because she is failing three courses. She give him the 'headache' and 'blacking out' story and tells him everything will be caught up soon. Then she sits down to write her Eyes and Ears column. She puts in a fake bit of news about Susan being seen with a mystery man because she wants to cause issues between Susan and Ken who are apparently dating.
Todd isn't handling things well. He knows that Liz has every right to be mad at him and break up with him because he's the reason she got hurt but the way she's acting is scaring him. He worries about her constantly and it's affecting him at school and on the court. He completely falls apart during a big game and gets thrown out for fighting. The coach benches him for several games and tells him to get his act together. Todd knows he can't as long as Liz is acting like a completely different person.
Still no one goes to Ned and Alice. Every character in this book knows how useless they are.
As the days go on, people keep approaching Jess saying that Liz is trying to steal their boyfriends. She's defensive at first but it just keeps going on and on. Borderline-inappropriate Mr Collins gets wind of what Liz did with the Eyes and Ears column and hauls her into the office. She tries to dance her away around it and he says: “I thought you and I were never going to dish each other applesauce.”
Um.....
What?
I tried to google this little saying and came up with nothing. I've literally never heard it before.
Liz tries to play the coma card but borderline-inappropriate Collins tells her that she's fired from the paper due to her breach of ethics. When she gets home from school, she finds her parents waiting for her for once. The GC called and reported that Liz turned in Winston's term paper as her own. For some reason instead of blaming Liz, they blame Jess for not telling them there was a problem with her sister. Excuse me, sir and madam, if you weren't such neglectful parents, you would have noticed yourself. I mean, it's crystal clear if you just talk to Liz for five minutes that something's different. Apparently they haven't done that and I'm not at all surprised.
A few days later, Jess and Todd are stunned to see Liz driving Max's motorcycle. If you don't remember Max, he's one of those band members that Pascal sprinkles around when it suits her. Jess gets practically hysterical seeing Liz on a motorcycle again. She begs Todd to stop Liz from going with Max but Todd points out that it's not his right to tell Liz who she can see. He figured she's done with him because of the accident and it hurts but he has to accept it and move on. Jess tries to get Liz away from the motorcycle but Liz says she and Max are headed to the beach and they take off again.
Jess pleads with Todd. For some reason she's responsible for making sure that Liz stays home because Liz is now grounded due to the term paper incident. She says if her parents find out Liz is out, Jess will be punished which is just unbelievably unfair. It's Ned and Alice's job to parent Liz, not Jess's. If they want her locked down, they have to be the ones to do it. This is in no way Jess's responsibility and I feel really bad for her because I've been there. Parenting my sister was my responsibility once too and it sucked to be the one who was punished for her misdeeds. Todd feels bad for Jess too and he takes off after Max and Liz.
Todd ends up pulling up beside the motorcycle at a red light. He forcibly takes Liz off the bike and carries her over his shoulder to his car. This is a little overboard but I just don't care anymore. He tries to talk to Liz as he takes her home but she's not interested in conversation. She accuses him of kidnapping which is pretty accurate and says that she'd done with him which he already assumed. When he drops her off, she goes straight up to bed claiming she has a headache.
At the end of this chapter we get a few paragraphs from Ned and Alice telling us they are much too busy to take Jean and Joan to some kind of band audition and that Jess is going to have to do it because Liz is grounded. I mean, giving up your day to take two preteens to a band audition sounds like a good punishment to me. Why can't Liz do it? Poor Jess. Why did Ned and Alice even take in these twins if they didn't have time to actually look after them? I hope Jean and Joan's parents don't read this book because if they do, they're going to be pissed.
Ned and Alice don't bother to tell Jess of her new assignment. They have Jean and Joan wake her up at 7:00am and hand her a note. Jess is pissed. She's supposed to meet Danny at the beach at noon. She has no choice, however, and drives the twins to their audition. She's hoping it will be a fast thing but they are numbers 73 and 74 or something and she ends up spending five hours there. She flies to the beach afterwards and gets a speeding ticket from an unsympathetic police officer. At the beach, she finds Danny all over some random chick in a white bikini and she storms off without approaching him. She's mad and yelling at the twins as she backs out of the parking spot and ends up getting into a minor fender bender.
Jess has really been through the ringer this book.
We skip to a party at Lila's house. I'm assuming it's later that day but it could be the next month for all I know. Pascal is really just hopping around willy nilly. Liz is given permission to go for some reason (she's allowed to go to a party but couldn't take the twins to their audition?????) but Jess is charged with looking out for her and keeping her out of trouble. Why is this Jessica's job??? I sincerely hate Ned and Alice. They're the worst.
The premise of this party is that they all go in costume and without dates and then they see who they can pick up while they're there. People in relationships will leave with people they aren't in relationships with. Um.....Pascal is just describing a key party here, right? What the hell IS this book?
Liz pretty much flirts with everyone and ends up making a full court press for Bruce which is just bizarre. We've been in her head off and on for this entire book but Pascal hasn't bothered to have Liz clue us in on her thought process here. It's really dumb. Liz should be thinking about what she's doing and why she's doing it so why not let us see that? It's making Liz very, very 2 dimensional in this book. She's just an NPC that we're watching but we have no idea what she's thinking or feeling. That should NOT be happening.
Liz gets a little drunk and ends up leaving the party with Bruce. He suggests they take some wine and a blanket down to the beach to have a little fun and she agrees even though she's actually too drunk to consent to anything. It doesn't end up mattering, however, because Todd and Jess arrive to save the day. They pull Liz out of Bruce's car and she tells Todd he's ruining her life before she passes out cold.
We skip ahead to school now. Maybe it's Monday, maybe it's Christmas. Who the hell knows? Surfer Bill approaches Liz in the hall to ask her to some kind of dance on Saturday. She agrees to go to the dance if he'll take her surfing the next day. She says she wants to go way out like he does but Bill is a little reluctant. He's a very experienced, award-winning surfer and Liz doesn't surf at all. He warns her that it's dangerous and she says that's what she likes about it and then she walks off “sexily”. Half a page later, she also makes a date with Bruce for the same night.
We fly ahead to Saturday night. I'm not surprised, I'm just disappointed. Bill comes to pick up Liz but Liz has sneaked off with Bruce. Jess dresses up in Liz's clothes and decides to be her for the night. She hasn't been on a real date in ages and decides this one is as good as any.
Liz and Bruce are at his house. He's making a big play to get in her pants because he sees it as his “greatest conquest” to get the normally conservative twin in bed. Liz says she wants to take it slow and that they shouldn't go up to his room but then her actions don't really match her words and I'm confused. Bruce decides to get some wine because that worked pretty good before. She waits for him on his bed.
We hop over to Jess who is feeling pretty smug about her switch. She's tried to ask Bill out before but he's always turned her down so she feels some kind of satisfaction that he's out with her having a great time. He tells her he loves her, thinking it's Liz, and she tells him that she thinks he really loves her sister. Bill protests that he doesn't even like Jess which doesn't seem to hurt her feelings much.
Back with Liz. She decides that she needs to refresh her hair and makeup for Bruce so she gets back out of bed to find a bathroom. As she's walking across the floor, she trips over the edge of a rug, going down hard and hitting her head. When she gets back up, she can't remember where she is or how she got there.
Are you fucking kidding me?
Is Pascal really going to play this off as 'she hit her head and turned into someone else until she hit her head again'?
Surely not.
They do that in bad cartoons. It's not a real thing that happens.
I can't even believe she's doing this.
Bruce comes back into the room and Liz is confused. She can't figure out what she's doing there with him. She asks him to take her home but he tells her she's going to give him what she's been teasing him with all week. He proceeds to try to assault her but she's able to get away. She runs outside and heads for the beach club because she's sure there will be people there. Along the way, she runs into Todd and collapses against him, sobbing. He realizes that she's back to her old self thanks to that trusty bonk on the head (I STILL CAN'T BELIEVE PASCAL DID THAT TO US) and they have a celebratory makeout session.
Back with Jess and Bill. He tells her he loves her again and she smiles up at him and tells him she's Jessica and then the book rather abruptly ends.
I feel like that ending just slammed into me like a truck. This book majorly sucked. We got a little of Jess's thought process and even a little of Todd's but none of Liz's. Even though we were in her head at points in this book, it was like she was completely devoid of any kind of thought. We had no idea why she was acting the way she was acting until the very end and even that didn't make any real sense. I feel like the TV series handled this a little better having Liz acting odd because she'd almost died and she was trying to live life to the fullest so she wouldn't die without having experienced anything. That makes sense. This does not.
Coming up next: I guess we'll be figuring out where this Bill/Jess thing goes. Yay.
