Review: "Sweet Valley Twins: Teacher's Pet" by Nicole Andelfinger and Claudia Aguirre

Sweet Valley Twins: Teacher's Pet by Nicole Andelfinger and Claudia Aguirre
Published June 2023 via Random House Graphic
★★★

In the second instalment of this Sweet Valley Twins graphic novel adaptation, Elizabeth and Jessica are in competition: their ballet class is scheduled for a performance, and there's only one star role. Elizabeth is the teacher's pet pupil...but Jessica is convinced that she's the better dancer.

On the whole, I think this series is doing an excellent job of staying true to the original while updating things for the 2020s. Elizabeth comes off pretty well here—more 'kind, rational tween' than 'little miss priss', as she often ends up in the books. Jessica...well, Jessica is frowny and green with jealousy and ready to step on anyone who gets in her way for the entire book, but that's also honestly a marked improvement on who Jessica often is in the originals.

The 'Jessica is a better and more dedicated dancer' plotline feels pretty uneven. We're told several times that Jessica practices more than Elizabeth, but most of what we see is Jessica wanting to spend time with the Unicorns, at the beach, etc., rather than practicing. Dance is 'everything' to Jessica, she says, but in practice that seems to mean that 'dance is everything to Jessica as long as she's in the spotlight and there's nothing more interesting going on'. Meanwhile, Elizabeth performs seemingly perfectly until she's under pressure, which means that it's hard to evaluate Jessica's claim throughout the book that she's a better dancer than Elizabeth.

But Jessica's right about one thing: the teacher isn't fair. We saw this in the first book (the teacher being really nasty because Jessica was a normal kid instead of a professional dancer), and here she really does seem to pick a couple of favourites and ignore everyone else. (If I read the non-graphic-novel version of this book, it was a very very long time ago and I don't remember what the teacher is like there!) Jessica eventually gets her attention, of course, but I think her parents would do better to find her a different ballet teacher.

The art style, which feels to me more comic book than graphic novel, isn't really to my personal tastes, but it gets the job done. (Though—at the end, when they're both on stage in one way or another, Jessica still looks furious that Elizabeth has the temerity to exist.) I'll happily continue with the series.