Thank you, Francine Pascal

Francine Pascal has died. She was a familiar name in my childhood as the author of the Sweet Valley High books, which I read voraciously. It’s funny, I don’t even recall how I got them at first. I must have bought some new, but they’re not the kind of thing my mother would have chosen - it’s like they appeared from somewhere, or were always there. And of course, like some kind of drug, I had to keep reading them. (The other series I read, Trixie Belden, I first acquired at random too - a whole batch from someone’s garage sale). It’s like the right books for a young girl just materialized.

But whereas Trixie Belden took place in the past, a picturesque world of the 1950s (ish - the beauty of this genre of books is the vagueness of the period). But Sweet Valley High was more current, at least to my childhood.