Review: "Sweet Valley Twins: The New Girl" by Nicole Andelfinger and Knack Whittle

Sweet Valley Twins: The New Girl by Nicole Andelfinger and Knack Whittle
Published May 2025 via Random House Graphic
★★★

The latest in the series! In which, dear god, everyone is awful. A new girl has moved to town, and the Wakefield parents want Elizabeth and Jessica to welcome her...which Elizabeth at least is willing to do, until it turns out that Brooke is, if not brattier than Jessica (that would be difficult), a whole lot more directly rude. She doesn't want to be friends, and she wants everyone to know it.

Cue Jessica hatching up a harebrained plot to introduce a fictional identical triplet, Jennifer, to become besties with Brooke...and then set her up to be laughed at by the whole school. Now, while I'm not going to even attempt to justify this (it's cruel, and it's intended to be cruel), it is perhaps worth noting that Brooke is so rude about everyone and everything that even Elizabeth is on board with this plan for much of the book—and Elizabeth is usually a very boring little saint. (Maybe also worth noting that "Jennifer" is basically Elizabeth, except a little more wide-eyed and innocent; it's unclear why Brooke likes Jennifer so much when she wouldn't give Elizabeth the time of day.)

I don't really know what to do with this series—the graphic novel adaptations, that is. I read a bunch of the originals when I was a child and really didn't think twice about how priggish Elizabeth was or how horrible Jessica was (or, for that matter, how little their parents seem to care what they're up to until it's too late to do anything about it). I've reread quite a lot of them as an adult (tinges of masochism?) and find the whole thing quite a bit more horrifying. And from what I've read recently of the originals, these adaptations are pretty true to the inspiration, so I can't fault them for the kids being overwhelmingly monsters. The artwork isn't really to my tastes, but it gets the job done. But can I recommend these? I mean...not really. Not any more than I can recommend the originals. Too much by way of kids being absolutely horrible to each other and not retaining any lessons between the end of one book and the start of the next.