Review: "Sweet Valley Twins: The Haunted House" by Nicole Andelfinger and Knack Whittle

Sweet Valley Twins: The Haunted House by Nicole Andelfinger and Knack Whittle
Published May 2024 via Random House Graphic
★★

The fourth in this graphic novel retread of the Sweet Valley Twins books. In The Haunted House, a new girl moves to town—and into a house widely thought (at least, you know, by the young and impressionable) to be inhabited by a witch. While Elizabeth sets out to befriend the new girl, Jessica falls predictably in line with the Unicorns as they seek to run said new girl out of town.

These graphic novels hew pretty closely to the originals, which means that Jessica and the Unicorns are just awful. Their bullying of Nora is intense and constant—they mock her relative poverty, steal her gym clothes, lie to teachers to get her in trouble, threaten to frame her for theft, and on and on it goes. And Nora, meanwhile, is so desperate for a bit of kindness that she's ready to forgive and forget the second the Unicorns offer a tiny crumb of kindness...and that she doesn't stop to consider whether that kindness is genuine or lasting.

Reading this brought to mind my own experience of being bullied in grade six—it was way less intense than this, but at the time I also would have been perfectly okay with being friends if the girl in question had just stopped being cruel. And now I think jeepers creepers, self (and jeepers creepers, Nora), that would never have been a healthy friendship. Meanwhile, Jessica comes out of the book feeling good about herself because there are five minutes towards the end of the book when she isn't a bully...but she's spent so much of the book perfectly happy to bully a girl for no reason at all (and again: they're not just being nasty to Nora; they're actively trying to damage her academic record, get her in trouble, and run her out of town if possible) that it really feels like too much for Jessica to come back from. This is, of course, fully in line with the original series...but I have to wonder what younger readers are seeing when they read this. I remember identifying much more with Elizabeth than with Jessica when I was younger, and also knowing that Elizabeth was pretty boring, but gosh. It worries me that there are probably a lot of kids who do identify more with Jessica.

I'm not a huge fan of the art in this one; the art throughout the series is already a bit more comic-y than I prefer, and the change of artists in this one means that the characters often have really messy-looking faces and expressions, which is of course a valid art style but not one that I prefer. Looks like both of the artists used for the adaptations so far are involved in future books, so my mileage might vary...but I have no bookish self-control, so I'll keep reading and just have to get used to it!