Peter Lerangis in Manila!

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Forgive me for the unexpected hiatus. This summer has been busier than I anticipated, but there was absolutely no way I would miss Peter Lerangis in Manila!

Peter Lerangis is a prolific author of over a hundred books, including three (and a quarter) books in Scholastic 39 Clues series, “The Sword Thief” (my personal favorite), “The Viper’s Nest,” one story in “Vespers Rising” (with other stories written with Rick Riordan, Gordon Korman, and Jude Watson), and “Dead of Night.” His new series, “The Seven Wonders,” ties in the Atlantis legend with the seven ancient wonders of the world, starting with “The Colossus Rises” and a second book, “Lost in Babylon” due out later this year.

What I found most interesting (and the cause of my excitement), is that before Peter Lerangis broke out on his own, he ghostwrote for many series for young readers — all the books I grew up on, in fact! — The Three Investigators (my all-time favorite kid detective series) Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, Sweet Valley Twins, and The Babysitters Club!

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Sweet Valley Marathon

My gut reaction after reading Sweet Valley Confidential was to banish it from my memory, and restore the Sweet Valley I grew up with and loved.

Because my collection of Sweet Valley books (including those signed by Cynthia and Brittany Daniels when they came over and I giddily lined up with my friends at National Book Store for the book signing) did not survive my childhood, some foraging was in order. I found some reissued copies of SVH released in 2008, and some e-books of SVH 1-12 apparently encoded by some hardcore fans. Later on, I managed to hunt down some actual SVH books, and one SVT. I spent one whole Saturday a couple months ago reading them!

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Sweet Valley Confidential

It’s been over a month since I read Francine Pascal’s Sweet Valley Confidential, and all this time this post has been sitting in my drafts folder, because I’ve been thinking about what to write in it.

Like most of my friends from grade school and high school, I grew up reading Sweet Valley books. Before I read them, my older sisters were already reading them and I was often the dummy player when the two of them played their Sweet Valley High board game, without understanding what it was all about (I was in pre-school — I just threw the dice and moved the token along the board!).

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