ABSTRACT
While critical considerations of the “Sweet Valley High” series in terms of its refl ection of historicity and its manipulations of generic conventions illuminate the literary and cultural positioning of the novels, the series must also be understood in the terms of its audience, the adolescent and pre-adolescent readers who purchased volume after volume and whose opinions of the series were in sharp contrast with their elders’. In the fi rst years of its publication, professional discussions of the Sweet Valley series and its ilk suggested that these readers had been duped by marketers and “fallen prey to formula romances” (Huntwork, 1990, p. 137). Librarians considered the series literary “competition . . . something else kids would rather do than read a good book” (Sutton, 1985, p. 29) and asked, “what, if anything, can be done to broaden the reading habits of formula fans?” (Huntwork, 1990, p. 137). “[T]rying to defend literary merit in the teen romance is as ludicrous as extolling the virtue of a steady diet of junkfood to hospital dieticians,” wrote one librarian in School Library Journal (Fong, 1990, p. 38), summarizing the adult critique of the novels. This disdain for such popular novels, particularly as they are devoured by child and adolescent subjects, still lingers, and refl ects what Catherine Sheldrick Ross calls the “persist[ent]” worry “that reading popular fi ction is harmful because it wastes time and instills ‘false views of life’ in impressionable readers” (2009, p. 633). Indeed, this concern is the subtext not only of much contemporary criticism of popular children’s fi ction but also much of the reader-response critique of popular romance. The weight of the historical and contemporary attitudes regarding popular reading habits have undoubtedly affected this contemporary reconsideration of “Sweet Valley High;” by spotlighting the remembered experiences and interpretations of the series’ initial readers and considering the contemporary re-readings of the series popularized in blogs and online magazines, we can attempt if not
to overcome, then to challenge the historical and critical ideologies that have informed the primarily negative popular, professional and academic assessments of the series.
