Sweet Valley High Special Edition #8: Jessica Takes Manhattan
Time for a personal favourite: Jessica Takes Manhattan. No, it's not the smutty crossover with Watchmen that you always longed for; rather, Jessica goes to New York ( again), although at no point can she be considered to "take it" in any sense of the phrase.
Evidence of my bad taste: I love this cover. I think Jess looks really pretty and I like the girly-girly background with the purple and the twinkly lights. Yeah, it's a little romance novelish (and by "a little", I mean, "HOLY CRAP, WHY DIDN'T THEY JUST HIRE FABIO TO PLAY THE DUDE"), but I don't think that SVH ever claimed to be anything else. So there.
Although it's really shooting fish in a barrel to make fun of all the inaccuracies in the books, I kind of love it when the twins travel the globe, mainly because it's an excuse for the ghost-writers to show off their knowledge of stereotypes about different places. If there is a Sweet Valley-issued map of the world, I imagine that it looks something like this:
Today's offering doesn't really buck the trend in terms of how much research was gone into the writing, but I still think it's kind of a fun read.
Sweet Valley High is closed due to a small earthquake which made the roof fall in! Awesome. The twins react to their unexpected holiday in predictable ways: Liz is investigating construction fraud for the school paper while Jessica is going to New York with Lila and Lila's dad. Jessica thinks that Liz needs a hobby. While I think we can all agree that Liz is stupendously boring, good job sassing the girl who has a hobby by pointing out that she needs a hobby, Jess.
Anyway, she scams her immediate family out of three hundred dollars and a set of designer suitcases. I have no sympathy for them because they ought to be used to her tricks by now. Then there's an unexpected mention of Jonathan Cain! Jessica describes him as a "seriously disturbed serial killer". I could almost believe this spin of events if it weren't for the fact that he TURNED INTO A MAGPIE ON A REGULAR BASIS. I don't think that's the sort of thing you can retcon. Did Liz not tell Jessica that Jonathan was a vampire? Maybe she was trying to preserve the final strands of her sister's sanity. I can appreciate that.
On the morning they're due to leave, Lila sleeps in and doesn't get to the airport in time. When an irate Jessica calls her, demanding to know where she is, she tells her to go ahead and get on the plane while Lila catches a later flight. Nice. Jessica is pleased to be travelling first class - courtesy of the Fowlers, so I guess she can't complain about lazy Lila too much - but less pleased to discover that she's sitting next to a "weirdo", wearing dark sunglasses, a moustache, and a beard. Robert Downey Jr.? He hits on her but she gives him the brush-off. I think maybe we're meant to think she's being a massive bitch here, but she doesn't owe him anything so whatever.
Suddenly the plane experiences technical difficulties and is forced to make an emergency landing in New Orleans. Man, this book is exciting, with its earthquakes and near-plane crashes. Jessica and the weirdo hold hands. Once they land, she pulls on his moustache (as you do to near-strangers...?) and it comes off...to reveal none other than ROCK STAR RYDER MITCHELL! Jessica is, to put it mildly, stoked, because he's her favourite rock star EVER! Somewhere on the outskirts of Sweet Valley, Johnny Buck is crying into his fifth beer.
Lila catches the plane to New York. She's currently pissed at her boyfriend, Bo, because she wanted him to come along for the trip. He'd rather stay at home in Washington DC because he has a French test to complete. Kind of boring, I admit, but what sixteen-year-olds blow off school for a few days to hang out with their girlfriends in New York, anyway? Anyway, she mopes for the entirety of the flight and all the way to the hotel. When she arrives at the entrance, the paparazzi take her picture and the manager personally escorts her to her room, which turns out to be an amazingly beautiful penthouse suite. Lila takes all this at face value. Hee. It must be nice to be as self-assured as she is. Jessica calls to tell her about landing in New Orleans and also to gloat about Ryder Mitchell. Lila sulks in her fancy penthouse.
Ryder Mitchell takes a twitterpated Jessica out for dinner in New Orleans. Then he tells her that he's engaged to some girl in New York and she runs away and cries. I don't believe that Jessica - who has spent the entire book thus far thinking about Ryder Mitchell, listening to his music, and quoting articles written about him - wouldn't already know about this engagement, but okay.
Bo shows up at the hotel to surprise Lila. Apparently he just made up the story about the French test for the lolz. He spots a girl who looks just like her in the lobby, but as he approaches, a guy in a suit throws him to the wall while "Lila" cries out in terror. Bo is left crumpled and confused on the hotel floor, not realising that this girl isn't really Lila; rather, she's just the latest in a long line of Sweet Valley lookalikes. For some reason, Bo doesn't find it strange that his girlfriend suddenly has a bodyguard and a completely different voice. I don't think Bo is very good at boyfriending.
Later that evening, Lila and Bo spot each other in the hotel restaurant. She assumes that he's in New York to see another girl (at the same time she's there? At the same hotel she told him she'd be at? I don't think Lila thought that one through), while he's confused because he still thinks she snubbed him that afternoon. Then they make out.
The following morning, the mystery is revealed when Lila finds out about her double while reading the papers. Lila fans will be pleased: her doppelganger isn't a psycho bent on stealing her life. She's a bona fide princess, baby! Princess Charlotte of Laestra, to be exact - a tiny country in eastern Europe which sounds like something out of The Adventures of Tintin. The paps mistook Lila for Charlotte when she entered the hotel and the manager just rolled with the mistake - hence the enormous room. Lila decides to reap the benefits of being mistaken for a princess. I can't really blame her, to be honest.
Meanwhile, Ryder Mitchell talks to Jessica on the plane, and explains that the engagement is a publicity stunt set up by his manager and the manager of this lady singer - who is "stupid and boring" - in order to sell more records for each of them. But he really loves Jessica! And now he's decided to break off the engagement, even if it means sacrificing his singing career! I'm not kidding, he actually tells her that. I have to say, Ryder Mitchell sounds pretty creepy. Nothing's said explicitly about how old he is, but given the fact that he's engaged to be married and he's been a rock star for a few years, I'm guessing that he's in his early to mid-twenties. So what's he doing chasing after this sixteen-year-old kid?
Wait, he just referred to himself as a "teenage star", so I guess he's eighteen or nineteen.
...He still sucks.
And it didn't occur to him to break off the engagement to the girl he hates before he met Jessica? Who, I note, he's known for a day at this point, and she spent a large portion of that time either snubbing him or being angry with him. Anyway, they agree to meet up in three day's time, on Valentine's Day, on the observation deck of the Empire State Building, after Ryder Mitchell has destroyed his career. Sorry, I mean, "told his manager that he's going to make his own decisions in the future".
When Jessica arrives at the Plaza, Lila makes her kneel and kiss her hand. Ha!
We get a scene from Princess Charlotte's perspective for the first time. She's staying in what should have been Jess and Lila's room, which is tiny - especially as her entire entourage is squeezed in there along with her. Apparently no one in New York has realised that Charlotte is the real princess, in spite of said entourage and the fact that she presumably speaks fluent Laestran or whatever the hell they speak in her made-up country. I don't know. It seems as though Charlotte doesn't want anyone to know either, though - she wants to slack off her official duties and go to Central Park. Maybe hang out with the characters from Friends. Fair enough.
Jessica, Lila, and Bo go out wining and dining. Bo orders the caviar and caper omelette. What a tool. Lila, meanwhile, is dodging her public by wearing a big, floppy hat. You know you're doing something wrong when Clark Kent would regard your disguise as amateurish.
Lila's dad - who's meant to be supervising them, I should note - leaves the girls a message to say that he's going to a meeting in Hong Kong all of a sudden. The girls react with glee, overjoyed to be alone in New York. Because they've been finding George Fowler's presence so overbearing over the past two days...?
The following day, Jessica gets dolled up for her date with Ryder Mitchell. She blew almost the entire three hundred dollars she got from her parents and sister on a beaded lavender dress, which even at the adoring age of eleven I thought sounded hopelessly middle-aged. The limo is late so she and Lila - who is meeting Bo at the World Trade Center (this book was published in 1997, remember) - catch a cab to avoid the rain and Lila's adoring fans. But wait - why is the cab driver looking so shifty?
Meanwhile, Princess Charlotte runs into a guy who convinces her to go to help out at a soup kitchen with him. He then abandons her, leaving her to gaze in wonder at a lady with dark skin, before reminding herself that "Americans come in every shape and color". Yes, non-whites are rarely seen outside of America, ghost-writer. Good job researching that. Then she ends up in hospital after she cuts herself with a knife. These scenes with her got pretty boring, to be honest.
Back to Jess and Li. They've been kidnapped by thugs who have mistaken Lila for Princess Charlotte! The cab stops after a while to let in a friend of the cabby, who blindfolds them both. They then drive on to a secret destination. There's clearly an element of planning in this, so I'm intrigued as to what their strategy would have been if Jessica and Lila had simply got into a different cab (or the limo they were meant to take in the first place, in fact).
When they get out of the cab, Jessica kicks the kidnappers the first chance she gets, which is a pretty stupid thing to do - and yet I kind of love her for it as well. The blindfolds are eventually removed once they're inside and sat down, but it's of little use as the room they're locked in is pitch black. I've read way too many of the stories on CrimeLibrary.com, as my mind immediately imagined the worst.
Ryder Mitchell cries at the top of the Empire State Building, thinking that Jessica has changed her mind about him. I laughed out loud at that, I'm afraid. Oh, schadenfreude.
The kidnappers call Princess Charlotte's hotel room up and tell her spokeswoman that she's been kidnapped. The spokeswoman laughs in their faces because she is in fact in the presence of Princess Charlotte right now! Boy, those kidnappers sure are left feeling stupid! (You kind of have to wonder how they got the correct room, given that Charlotte is checked into a room under Lila's name - and I'd be surprised if hotels put calls through to royalty from the general public anyway. If we were robbed of a hilarious sequence where we got to see the kidnappers calling every room in the hotel to get to the right one - well, I'm not too upset if we were, to be honest.)
The kidnappers angrily confront Lila about the fact that she's not really a princess. Then they raid her purse and buy the girls junk food to eat. Then they threaten to kill them. This kind of repeats itself for two days until Lila tells them that Bo will pony up the money to set them free. (Apparently Lila's parents are totally unreachable. AGAIN. It's a good thing that Lila is capable of scavenging for food for herself. If she were a puppy or kitten, she'd have starved to death long ago.)
Princess Charlotte anonymously donates a ton of money and equipment to the soup kitchen, which is a nice gesture. That's the last of that storyline, thank God.
Bo and Ryder Mitchell team up to discover what happened to their girlfriends! Lamest crimefighting team ever. Their grand scheme involves calling up the police station a couple of times and yelling at them. It's actually the kidnappers who get the ball rolling when they call Bo and tell him to leave a million dollars in cash under one of the seats in the Yankee Stadium at midnight. Even though that's on the unambitious side for kidnappers, does Bo really have ready access to that much money? I know he's meant to be a rich kid and all, but he's also sixteen years old. Even Lila's card maxes out at $75,000.
Actually, it doesn't matter - Bo doesn't plan on giving the kidnappers any money at all. Instead, he and Ryder Mitchell plan to lie in wait and catch the kidnappers in the act - rather than, you know, telling the police or Jessica's parents (although to be fair, both parties have proven themselves totally incompetent on numerous occasions, so maybe Bo and Ryder Mitchell are actually doing the sensible thing).
Meanwhile, the girls have got themselves free and manage to scatter baseballs across the floor! The kidnappers, when they enter the room again, trip over while Jess and Lila run out and lock the door on them. Nicely done, girls! They wander through a maze of storage rooms until they finally make their way outside, to discover that they were locked up in the Yankee Stadium. (The kidnappers were hiding them in the same place where they wanted Bo to leave the ransom? Worst. Kidnappers. Ever.) They escape in the cab which was used to kidnap them in the first place. That was pretty cool.
Bo and Ryder Mitchell pull up, only just missing them. They decide to investigate the interior and wind up in the same storage room as Jessica and Lila were being kept in. Then the kidnappers knock them out. What failboats.
The girls return to the Plaza, congratulating themselves on their awesomeness, only to become worried when they haven't received any messages from Bo or Ryder Mitchell. Have they been DUMPED? No, of course not. A doorman tells them that he saw the boyfriends headed to the Yankee Stadium a few hours ago. All of a sudden, Princess Charlotte shows up! She descends into the lobby via a mechanical crane for the sole purpose of solving their problems! Not really. Although she does solve their problems. Instead of being pissed at the girl who's been swanning about pretending to be her for the past few days, she listens to Jess and Lila's story and gets her bodyguards to take them back to the Stadium.
They show up to rescue the boyfriends in the nick of time! The kidnappers are arrested and that about wraps the storyline up. Oh, and Princess Charlotte refunds them for the dresses they wore that were spoilt in the three days they were stuck wearing them, which is nice of her. Jessica buys a new outfit that defies belief in hideousness: "a sporty black-and-red plaid skirt and a yellow turtleneck sweater...a pair of black leather boots, a silver bracelet, a brown shearling jacket..." Hot. You can actually see the outfit on the extended cover image. (Thanks to deathycat for the images.)
Then Ryder Mitchell holds a concert in the Empire State Building and makes out with Jessica in front of everyone. The end!
I have to say, I do think this book is pretty cute, and it's probably one of the better ones from later on in the series. Maybe it's a little too packed full of exciting events (there's an earthquake! And a plane crash! And they hang out with celebrities! And they're kidnapped!) and I could've done without the Roman Holiday-esque subplot with Princess Charlotte. But it's a fun piece of escapism and I enjoyed the fact that the girls managed to rescue themselves and then rescued their boyfriends, rather than the other way round. And, you know, the comedy is light and the romance scenes don't drag on forever, and the ghost-writer did a nice take on the Jessica/Lila friendship. And the Amazon reviews for it are all wildly enthusiastic, and that has to count for something, right? RIGHT??
Incidentally, Ryder Mitchell is never heard of again in the Sweet Valley series. Jessica presumably broke up with him shortly after this book ended, because dumping a guy who gambled his career for her is the sort of thing she'd find funny. I'm guessing that breaking his engagement to that lady singer led to his sales slipping further and further down the charts, accelerating his inevitable decline into a coke habit, until finally his record company dropped him. Maybe in ten years or so he'll show up on a reality show in an attempt to revive his career, or on an ohnotheydidnt "Where Are They Now?" post. For now, though, he can rest content with the knowledge that he has known the love - however temporary - of a Wakefield twin.
Evidence of my bad taste: I love this cover. I think Jess looks really pretty and I like the girly-girly background with the purple and the twinkly lights. Yeah, it's a little romance novelish (and by "a little", I mean, "HOLY CRAP, WHY DIDN'T THEY JUST HIRE FABIO TO PLAY THE DUDE"), but I don't think that SVH ever claimed to be anything else. So there.
Although it's really shooting fish in a barrel to make fun of all the inaccuracies in the books, I kind of love it when the twins travel the globe, mainly because it's an excuse for the ghost-writers to show off their knowledge of stereotypes about different places. If there is a Sweet Valley-issued map of the world, I imagine that it looks something like this:
Today's offering doesn't really buck the trend in terms of how much research was gone into the writing, but I still think it's kind of a fun read.
Sweet Valley High is closed due to a small earthquake which made the roof fall in! Awesome. The twins react to their unexpected holiday in predictable ways: Liz is investigating construction fraud for the school paper while Jessica is going to New York with Lila and Lila's dad. Jessica thinks that Liz needs a hobby. While I think we can all agree that Liz is stupendously boring, good job sassing the girl who has a hobby by pointing out that she needs a hobby, Jess.
Anyway, she scams her immediate family out of three hundred dollars and a set of designer suitcases. I have no sympathy for them because they ought to be used to her tricks by now. Then there's an unexpected mention of Jonathan Cain! Jessica describes him as a "seriously disturbed serial killer". I could almost believe this spin of events if it weren't for the fact that he TURNED INTO A MAGPIE ON A REGULAR BASIS. I don't think that's the sort of thing you can retcon. Did Liz not tell Jessica that Jonathan was a vampire? Maybe she was trying to preserve the final strands of her sister's sanity. I can appreciate that.
On the morning they're due to leave, Lila sleeps in and doesn't get to the airport in time. When an irate Jessica calls her, demanding to know where she is, she tells her to go ahead and get on the plane while Lila catches a later flight. Nice. Jessica is pleased to be travelling first class - courtesy of the Fowlers, so I guess she can't complain about lazy Lila too much - but less pleased to discover that she's sitting next to a "weirdo", wearing dark sunglasses, a moustache, and a beard. Robert Downey Jr.? He hits on her but she gives him the brush-off. I think maybe we're meant to think she's being a massive bitch here, but she doesn't owe him anything so whatever.
Suddenly the plane experiences technical difficulties and is forced to make an emergency landing in New Orleans. Man, this book is exciting, with its earthquakes and near-plane crashes. Jessica and the weirdo hold hands. Once they land, she pulls on his moustache (as you do to near-strangers...?) and it comes off...to reveal none other than ROCK STAR RYDER MITCHELL! Jessica is, to put it mildly, stoked, because he's her favourite rock star EVER! Somewhere on the outskirts of Sweet Valley, Johnny Buck is crying into his fifth beer.
Lila catches the plane to New York. She's currently pissed at her boyfriend, Bo, because she wanted him to come along for the trip. He'd rather stay at home in Washington DC because he has a French test to complete. Kind of boring, I admit, but what sixteen-year-olds blow off school for a few days to hang out with their girlfriends in New York, anyway? Anyway, she mopes for the entirety of the flight and all the way to the hotel. When she arrives at the entrance, the paparazzi take her picture and the manager personally escorts her to her room, which turns out to be an amazingly beautiful penthouse suite. Lila takes all this at face value. Hee. It must be nice to be as self-assured as she is. Jessica calls to tell her about landing in New Orleans and also to gloat about Ryder Mitchell. Lila sulks in her fancy penthouse.
Ryder Mitchell takes a twitterpated Jessica out for dinner in New Orleans. Then he tells her that he's engaged to some girl in New York and she runs away and cries. I don't believe that Jessica - who has spent the entire book thus far thinking about Ryder Mitchell, listening to his music, and quoting articles written about him - wouldn't already know about this engagement, but okay.
Bo shows up at the hotel to surprise Lila. Apparently he just made up the story about the French test for the lolz. He spots a girl who looks just like her in the lobby, but as he approaches, a guy in a suit throws him to the wall while "Lila" cries out in terror. Bo is left crumpled and confused on the hotel floor, not realising that this girl isn't really Lila; rather, she's just the latest in a long line of Sweet Valley lookalikes. For some reason, Bo doesn't find it strange that his girlfriend suddenly has a bodyguard and a completely different voice. I don't think Bo is very good at boyfriending.
Later that evening, Lila and Bo spot each other in the hotel restaurant. She assumes that he's in New York to see another girl (at the same time she's there? At the same hotel she told him she'd be at? I don't think Lila thought that one through), while he's confused because he still thinks she snubbed him that afternoon. Then they make out.
The following morning, the mystery is revealed when Lila finds out about her double while reading the papers. Lila fans will be pleased: her doppelganger isn't a psycho bent on stealing her life. She's a bona fide princess, baby! Princess Charlotte of Laestra, to be exact - a tiny country in eastern Europe which sounds like something out of The Adventures of Tintin. The paps mistook Lila for Charlotte when she entered the hotel and the manager just rolled with the mistake - hence the enormous room. Lila decides to reap the benefits of being mistaken for a princess. I can't really blame her, to be honest.
Meanwhile, Ryder Mitchell talks to Jessica on the plane, and explains that the engagement is a publicity stunt set up by his manager and the manager of this lady singer - who is "stupid and boring" - in order to sell more records for each of them. But he really loves Jessica! And now he's decided to break off the engagement, even if it means sacrificing his singing career! I'm not kidding, he actually tells her that. I have to say, Ryder Mitchell sounds pretty creepy. Nothing's said explicitly about how old he is, but given the fact that he's engaged to be married and he's been a rock star for a few years, I'm guessing that he's in his early to mid-twenties. So what's he doing chasing after this sixteen-year-old kid?
Wait, he just referred to himself as a "teenage star", so I guess he's eighteen or nineteen.
...He still sucks.
And it didn't occur to him to break off the engagement to the girl he hates before he met Jessica? Who, I note, he's known for a day at this point, and she spent a large portion of that time either snubbing him or being angry with him. Anyway, they agree to meet up in three day's time, on Valentine's Day, on the observation deck of the Empire State Building, after Ryder Mitchell has destroyed his career. Sorry, I mean, "told his manager that he's going to make his own decisions in the future".
When Jessica arrives at the Plaza, Lila makes her kneel and kiss her hand. Ha!
We get a scene from Princess Charlotte's perspective for the first time. She's staying in what should have been Jess and Lila's room, which is tiny - especially as her entire entourage is squeezed in there along with her. Apparently no one in New York has realised that Charlotte is the real princess, in spite of said entourage and the fact that she presumably speaks fluent Laestran or whatever the hell they speak in her made-up country. I don't know. It seems as though Charlotte doesn't want anyone to know either, though - she wants to slack off her official duties and go to Central Park. Maybe hang out with the characters from Friends. Fair enough.
Jessica, Lila, and Bo go out wining and dining. Bo orders the caviar and caper omelette. What a tool. Lila, meanwhile, is dodging her public by wearing a big, floppy hat. You know you're doing something wrong when Clark Kent would regard your disguise as amateurish.
Lila's dad - who's meant to be supervising them, I should note - leaves the girls a message to say that he's going to a meeting in Hong Kong all of a sudden. The girls react with glee, overjoyed to be alone in New York. Because they've been finding George Fowler's presence so overbearing over the past two days...?
The following day, Jessica gets dolled up for her date with Ryder Mitchell. She blew almost the entire three hundred dollars she got from her parents and sister on a beaded lavender dress, which even at the adoring age of eleven I thought sounded hopelessly middle-aged. The limo is late so she and Lila - who is meeting Bo at the World Trade Center (this book was published in 1997, remember) - catch a cab to avoid the rain and Lila's adoring fans. But wait - why is the cab driver looking so shifty?
Meanwhile, Princess Charlotte runs into a guy who convinces her to go to help out at a soup kitchen with him. He then abandons her, leaving her to gaze in wonder at a lady with dark skin, before reminding herself that "Americans come in every shape and color". Yes, non-whites are rarely seen outside of America, ghost-writer. Good job researching that. Then she ends up in hospital after she cuts herself with a knife. These scenes with her got pretty boring, to be honest.
Back to Jess and Li. They've been kidnapped by thugs who have mistaken Lila for Princess Charlotte! The cab stops after a while to let in a friend of the cabby, who blindfolds them both. They then drive on to a secret destination. There's clearly an element of planning in this, so I'm intrigued as to what their strategy would have been if Jessica and Lila had simply got into a different cab (or the limo they were meant to take in the first place, in fact).
When they get out of the cab, Jessica kicks the kidnappers the first chance she gets, which is a pretty stupid thing to do - and yet I kind of love her for it as well. The blindfolds are eventually removed once they're inside and sat down, but it's of little use as the room they're locked in is pitch black. I've read way too many of the stories on CrimeLibrary.com, as my mind immediately imagined the worst.
Ryder Mitchell cries at the top of the Empire State Building, thinking that Jessica has changed her mind about him. I laughed out loud at that, I'm afraid. Oh, schadenfreude.
The kidnappers call Princess Charlotte's hotel room up and tell her spokeswoman that she's been kidnapped. The spokeswoman laughs in their faces because she is in fact in the presence of Princess Charlotte right now! Boy, those kidnappers sure are left feeling stupid! (You kind of have to wonder how they got the correct room, given that Charlotte is checked into a room under Lila's name - and I'd be surprised if hotels put calls through to royalty from the general public anyway. If we were robbed of a hilarious sequence where we got to see the kidnappers calling every room in the hotel to get to the right one - well, I'm not too upset if we were, to be honest.)
The kidnappers angrily confront Lila about the fact that she's not really a princess. Then they raid her purse and buy the girls junk food to eat. Then they threaten to kill them. This kind of repeats itself for two days until Lila tells them that Bo will pony up the money to set them free. (Apparently Lila's parents are totally unreachable. AGAIN. It's a good thing that Lila is capable of scavenging for food for herself. If she were a puppy or kitten, she'd have starved to death long ago.)
Princess Charlotte anonymously donates a ton of money and equipment to the soup kitchen, which is a nice gesture. That's the last of that storyline, thank God.
Bo and Ryder Mitchell team up to discover what happened to their girlfriends! Lamest crimefighting team ever. Their grand scheme involves calling up the police station a couple of times and yelling at them. It's actually the kidnappers who get the ball rolling when they call Bo and tell him to leave a million dollars in cash under one of the seats in the Yankee Stadium at midnight. Even though that's on the unambitious side for kidnappers, does Bo really have ready access to that much money? I know he's meant to be a rich kid and all, but he's also sixteen years old. Even Lila's card maxes out at $75,000.
Actually, it doesn't matter - Bo doesn't plan on giving the kidnappers any money at all. Instead, he and Ryder Mitchell plan to lie in wait and catch the kidnappers in the act - rather than, you know, telling the police or Jessica's parents (although to be fair, both parties have proven themselves totally incompetent on numerous occasions, so maybe Bo and Ryder Mitchell are actually doing the sensible thing).
Meanwhile, the girls have got themselves free and manage to scatter baseballs across the floor! The kidnappers, when they enter the room again, trip over while Jess and Lila run out and lock the door on them. Nicely done, girls! They wander through a maze of storage rooms until they finally make their way outside, to discover that they were locked up in the Yankee Stadium. (The kidnappers were hiding them in the same place where they wanted Bo to leave the ransom? Worst. Kidnappers. Ever.) They escape in the cab which was used to kidnap them in the first place. That was pretty cool.
Bo and Ryder Mitchell pull up, only just missing them. They decide to investigate the interior and wind up in the same storage room as Jessica and Lila were being kept in. Then the kidnappers knock them out. What failboats.
The girls return to the Plaza, congratulating themselves on their awesomeness, only to become worried when they haven't received any messages from Bo or Ryder Mitchell. Have they been DUMPED? No, of course not. A doorman tells them that he saw the boyfriends headed to the Yankee Stadium a few hours ago. All of a sudden, Princess Charlotte shows up! She descends into the lobby via a mechanical crane for the sole purpose of solving their problems! Not really. Although she does solve their problems. Instead of being pissed at the girl who's been swanning about pretending to be her for the past few days, she listens to Jess and Lila's story and gets her bodyguards to take them back to the Stadium.
They show up to rescue the boyfriends in the nick of time! The kidnappers are arrested and that about wraps the storyline up. Oh, and Princess Charlotte refunds them for the dresses they wore that were spoilt in the three days they were stuck wearing them, which is nice of her. Jessica buys a new outfit that defies belief in hideousness: "a sporty black-and-red plaid skirt and a yellow turtleneck sweater...a pair of black leather boots, a silver bracelet, a brown shearling jacket..." Hot. You can actually see the outfit on the extended cover image. (Thanks to deathycat for the images.)
Then Ryder Mitchell holds a concert in the Empire State Building and makes out with Jessica in front of everyone. The end!
I have to say, I do think this book is pretty cute, and it's probably one of the better ones from later on in the series. Maybe it's a little too packed full of exciting events (there's an earthquake! And a plane crash! And they hang out with celebrities! And they're kidnapped!) and I could've done without the Roman Holiday-esque subplot with Princess Charlotte. But it's a fun piece of escapism and I enjoyed the fact that the girls managed to rescue themselves and then rescued their boyfriends, rather than the other way round. And, you know, the comedy is light and the romance scenes don't drag on forever, and the ghost-writer did a nice take on the Jessica/Lila friendship. And the Amazon reviews for it are all wildly enthusiastic, and that has to count for something, right? RIGHT??
Incidentally, Ryder Mitchell is never heard of again in the Sweet Valley series. Jessica presumably broke up with him shortly after this book ended, because dumping a guy who gambled his career for her is the sort of thing she'd find funny. I'm guessing that breaking his engagement to that lady singer led to his sales slipping further and further down the charts, accelerating his inevitable decline into a coke habit, until finally his record company dropped him. Maybe in ten years or so he'll show up on a reality show in an attempt to revive his career, or on an ohnotheydidnt "Where Are They Now?" post. For now, though, he can rest content with the knowledge that he has known the love - however temporary - of a Wakefield twin.