Sweet Valley Twins Super Chiller: The Curse of the Golden Heart
This was the first Sweet Valley book I ever read. I picked it up again to see if it had stood the test of time.
We open with the twins, Steven, Joe Howell and Lila all hanging out at the beach. Given that most of these characters hate each other in the other books, this isn't very plausible, but whatever. It's established that it's spring break (possibly the twins' eighth one this year so far, given how many Sweet Valley books there are focusing on holidays), and that they intend to spend it hanging out on the beach eating junk food - all except Lila, who is scared of getting fat and spotty. She just wants to reapply her new tanning formula from Europe. Fair enough.
Jess and Liz go snorkelling at the bad part of the beach. It's not really explained why it's bad - we're just told that it has a "bad reputation". What could possibly lurk there? Murderers? Rapists? Insane stalkers who want to steal your life? All of these crop up wherever you go in Sweet Valley, so whatever's at the bad part of the beach has got to be some pretty dangerous shit. Liz collects rubbish from the ocean floor and thinks she sees a shipwreck.
As she surfaces, there's some of the generic "creepy" writing that crops up in all of the spooky SV books - howling winds, sudden chills, etc. - and when Liz and Jess finally make it to land, they meet a mysterious old man who stares out at the sea and ignores them when they speak to him. Spooooooooooooky. Given that this is southern California, though, he could just as easily be an elderly hippie stoned out of his mind.
The next day, Amy and Janet join the group. We are told that Lila's tanning formula didn't work so she's wearing a big hat to keep the sun's rays out of her face instead. But...surely the point of the tanning formula was to get a suntan, and a hat would negate that? Never mind - mine is not to question the mind of Lila Fowler.
Everyone decides to take scuba diving lessons. The twins are surprised when their parents give them permission (and money) to do this. I'm not - we all know that Ned and Alice are the most irresponsible parents ever. Who gives their mischievous twelve-year-old daughters extra money, especially without even meeting the scuba diving teacher to at least confirm that he is responsible?
Anyway, the teacher turns out to be the same mysterious old man the twins saw on the pier before. His name is Joshua Farrell and he is from Scotland. He tells them, "I ran away to sea when I was a boy. And I never saw my home again." Spooooooooooooky.
Liz goes through the junk she collected from the ocean floor. She keeps most of the stuff but throws away something covered in barnacles which she can't be bothered to clean off. This will be significant later.
The next morning, the twins receive chain letters in the post. I think they should be grateful that this book was written before everybody had internet access, otherwise they'd be stuck spending half an hour adding up the number of letters in their favourite song to reveal the name of their hidden crush, or however those chain emails worked. The letter itself is written in what the writer considers spooooooooooooky language, and the gist of it is this: because someone (read: Liz) has stolen half of something (read: the thing covered in barnacles) from somewhere (read: the bottom of the sea), the letter writer is pissed, and both Liz and Jess must send the letter on to six friends - or never get kissed ever! Just kidding - they'll be "cursed by Carlotta". Predictably, Jess is thrilled and Liz thinks it's nonsense.
Jess decides to send her letters to Steven, Joe and her Unicorn Club friends, and she's going to hand-deliver them as well. I bet her friends hate her. Actually, they don't - at the club meeting, as soon as she mentions the curse to them, they "bent their heads back over their papers and began to scribble". They're all idiots.
Lila comes into the meeting late because she was at a hairdressing appointment. She takes the curse as seriously as the others but because her father's secretary (who handles all her correspondence) is out of town, she can't write the letters yet. That blows. Can Lila literally not write anything without the secretary being around? How does she send out invitations to keep up with the Sweet Valley Party Quota? Lila sensibly says that the curse can wait a few weeks.
That night, Liz has a bad dream. She's on board a ship during a storm, surrounded by pirates. It's Tim Curry and his nefarious band of Muppets! No, not really, but that's cooler than the truth. Liz watches two men swordfight (one of them looks like Joshua Farrell and the other has a red beard) and a woman scream as the ship sinks. Spooooooooooooky. Liz wakes up screaming.
The gang all take the same bus to the beach for their first lesson - even Lila, Janet and Joe, who live on the other side of town from the Wakefields, if I remember my SVT canon correctly. Joe confesses, "I sent [my letters] to all my friends to hate to write and owe me letters. I figured that would pay them back for being such lousy correspondents." Okay, heh. Joe's got the right idea there.
They get to the beach but Joshua Farrell isn't anywhere to be seen. Amy suggests that he decided he didn't want to teach children: "He looked like a pretty crusty old salt to me," she says. That's such a dorky thing to say and I kind of love her for it. Liz volunteers to go and find him in his house and is frightened when she sees a wetsuit floating in midair of its own accord. Spooooooooooooky.
Joshua Farrell finally shows up and the lesson is about to begin, but Lila has lost her expensive watch. Jess thinks that it's because she's cursed. Well, whose fault is that, Jessica? It was you who sent her the stupid letter in the first place.
Jess is sleeping over at Lila's house and is staring enviously around in Lila's bathroom, which is filled with hairdryers, purple towels and telephones. Who has a telephone in their bathroom, other than Joey Tribbiani? Jess is impressed, though, and thinks, I could live happily in Lila's bathroom for the rest of my life. Heh.
Lila breaks a nail, rips her bathrobe, and reveals that she fell down the stairs and slid into the kitchen cabinet earlier that day. This, combined with the loss of her watch, convinces her that she really is cursed, and Jess urges her to write the letters. I have to say, Jess and Lila are really nice to each other in this book. It's a little weird, but I like it - their friendship across the series is awesome. Lila ruins her favourite pen and breaks her dad's computer when trying to write the letters. Apparently the spirit will only accept plain, hand-written letters, which seems a little entitled of it.
Everyone goes scuba-diving. Unfortunately Liz nearly drowns when she sees Joshua Farrell underwater - there's no face in his mask (ykoooooooooooops!) and she panics and blacks out - but even freaking Jessica thinks that she's making it up. Jessica, whose only real action in the book so far is to act as personal cheerleader for the Curse of Carlotta.
The Wakefield parents realise that hey, maybe it wasn't such a great idea to send their three pubescent children off to scuba-dive with a guy they'd never met. That's about as far as it goes, though, as Liz convinces them to let them continue taking lessons. Then Lila comes round and tells the twins that she's grounded - apparently when she was writing the letter out on her dad's computer, she managed to email it (or "download it" through "electronic mail", as the book puts it. Oh, 1995) to everyone in her dad's company.
Liz has another dream, where she sees the red-bearded man and the lady from before on the ship. The man who looks like Joshua Farrell leaves his post on deck. Liz looks around and we get, She crept around the deck, examining the ropes. "Wow. This stuff is interesting," she said out loud. Only Liz would find herself aboard a pirate ship and spend her time checking out the nifty ropework.
The next day at the beach, a scorpion is found in Liz's lunch bag! That's about it, but everyone is more convinced than ever that she is cursed. If I was Liz, I'd write the stupid letters just to shut everyone else up. When Joshua Farrell show up to give them their lesson, Liz suddenly realises that she's not ready yet to go back into the water. This is the only bit of the book to be realistic - after all, the poor kid did nearly just drown out there recently.
A guy called John Filber comes to see the twins. He works for Mr. Fowler and received the chain email Lila sent out, and he's very interested in the Curse of Carlotta as it's "significant" in his family. He wants to take them to the bad part of the beach and tells them that he got their address from the Fowlers' cook. Spoooo- actually, if I were the twins' parents, I would be so pissed with the cook. Who wants some random guy calling up your twelve-year-old daughters and saying that he wants to take them to a shady part of town? The twins are dumb enough to agree to meet him there the following morning.
When they meet Filber the next day, he just wants them to look over the edge of the pier. They see something gleaming in the coral and Filber admits that he doesn't know what it is, but his father brought him to see it, and his grandfather brought his father to see it, and so on. None of them are allowed to touch it, whatever it is, otherwise they'll be cursed by Carlotta. Fine, but I don't see what the twins have to do with this. I mean, for all Filber knows, they just received the chain letter from someone else. He tells them about his dreams and they're the same ones that Liz is having - he's on board a sinking ship and a young couple have been separated. Say it with me: spooooooooooooky.
That evening there's a cookout at the beach and everyone sits around and tells ghost stories. Joshua Farrell is there too, and I have to say that when I was twelve, the last thing I wanted was to hang out with an old guy. My top three topics of conversation at that age were 1) Sweet Valley books, 2) Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and 3) Leonardo diCaprio, and I'd have felt so uncomfortable talking about any of them in front of an old dude. The kids don't seem to feel this degree of awkwardness around him, though, and he starts telling them a story about a dangerous pirate.
His name was Red Beard (sound familiar?) and he wanted to marry the governor's niece, whose name was Carlotta (how about that?). Because "she could never be the wife of a thief and a pirate", Red Beard agrees to stop being one, and, with the governor's blessing, the two of them sail away to the New World. On the way, they split a gold locket the governor gave them in two, each of them wearing one half, but a storm overturns the ship and Red Beard and Carlotta are separated. Apparently it was the bosun's fault, as he was down in the hold looking for Red Beard's treasure map instead of looking out for the reef that the ship crashed into. Joshua Farrell finishes this unlikely story off by saying, "Legend says that the ghost of the bosun can never rest until he has reunited the lovers...by reuniting the heart." This book would be so much better if it involved Johnny Depp and cursed Aztec gold.
Liz finally accepts that maybe she's cursed. She still won't send the stupid letters, though. Instead, she and Jess look through her stuff to see if she's got half of the locket squirreled away somewhere, but they can't find anything. Then Liz gets another letter from Carlotta. She's given up threats and now promises to reward Liz "beyond her dreams". Congrats, Liz - your holier-than-thou attitude frustrates even two-hundred-year-old ghosts. Finally, she works out that the thing she threw into her bin a zillion chapters ago is probably half of the locket.
And it is! What's more, there's half a treasure map on the back. The twins tell Steven everything, and he threatens to tell their parents about them sneaking off to meet Filber because "they need to ground you guys or something" - which is true, but is seriously overestimating Ned and Alice's parenting abilities. He actually harps on about this for about half a page, which is kind of sweet of him.
Liz notes that the map that the bosun was searching for was on the locket rather than down in the hold. This is stupid. Joshua Farrell established in his story that it was the governor who gave Red Beard the locket, and why would the governor know where Red Beard's treasure was? Unless Red Beard had it inscribed later, which is dumb as well. He's meant to be high-tailing it to America with his new piece of ass, not stopping to get his personal effects engraved.
The three of them also realise that the shining thing that Filber showed the twins just off the pier was the other half of the locket. Steve and Jess go gaga over the idea of treasure and Liz disapproves. Shut up, Liz, you think ropes are cool. Liz also finally starts to suspect that Joshua Farrell is actually the ghost of the bosun. Took her long enough. She goes to the library and establishes that this is fact, as well as the fact that the bosun was one of the survivors and that Filber is descended from him.
Liz goes home and takes a nap. She has another dream featuring Carlotta and Red Beard. Carlotta tells her that it's the bosun who's been sending the letters. Also, the bosun's descendants are cursed as well as him. Guess the bosun wasn't too broken up about betraying his shipmates and being responsible for the deaths of his friends to settle down and have a family. Liz realises that she needs to reunite the two halves of the locket as soon as possible.
At the beach, Steven manages to get the half-locket free from the coral. But just as they're about to put the two halves together, up comes Filber! He wants the treasure map as well, you see, and Liz reluctantly hands the locket over, quickly joining it together first so that at least Red Beard and Carlotta can be reunited.
Unfortunately, because of the bosun's family curse, he trips and the locket falls into the water, lost forever. That's a pretty lame curse. "Oh no, I've lost the map leading to treasure I never possessed in the first place! Guess I'll just go back to my cushy job working for one of the richest men in Sweet Valley." I was hoping that he'd be horribly disfigured at the very least. The three kids leave Filber on the pier, and Liz sees Joshua Farrell disappear into the mist. Spooooooooooooky.
Back home, Liz explains everything to Jess and Steven, including the fact that it was Joshua Farrell who was sending the letters. He had seen her get out of the water with the locket and decided to send the chain letters to the twins. Jess and Steven, however, think that this was all just an elaborate prank Liz decided to play on them and pelt her with popcorn. I'd say that any "prank" that involved me nearly drowning would be taking things too far, but whatever.
That night, Liz dreams about Red Beard and Carlotta holding each other in each other's arms on board a clear-sailing ship. They smile at her and then make out. Liz presumably checks out the ropes again. They really are something!
And that's the end of the book. I can't believe that SVT managed to make the concept of cursed pirate treasure even more stupid than it already sounds, but there you go.
We open with the twins, Steven, Joe Howell and Lila all hanging out at the beach. Given that most of these characters hate each other in the other books, this isn't very plausible, but whatever. It's established that it's spring break (possibly the twins' eighth one this year so far, given how many Sweet Valley books there are focusing on holidays), and that they intend to spend it hanging out on the beach eating junk food - all except Lila, who is scared of getting fat and spotty. She just wants to reapply her new tanning formula from Europe. Fair enough.
Jess and Liz go snorkelling at the bad part of the beach. It's not really explained why it's bad - we're just told that it has a "bad reputation". What could possibly lurk there? Murderers? Rapists? Insane stalkers who want to steal your life? All of these crop up wherever you go in Sweet Valley, so whatever's at the bad part of the beach has got to be some pretty dangerous shit. Liz collects rubbish from the ocean floor and thinks she sees a shipwreck.
As she surfaces, there's some of the generic "creepy" writing that crops up in all of the spooky SV books - howling winds, sudden chills, etc. - and when Liz and Jess finally make it to land, they meet a mysterious old man who stares out at the sea and ignores them when they speak to him. Spooooooooooooky. Given that this is southern California, though, he could just as easily be an elderly hippie stoned out of his mind.
The next day, Amy and Janet join the group. We are told that Lila's tanning formula didn't work so she's wearing a big hat to keep the sun's rays out of her face instead. But...surely the point of the tanning formula was to get a suntan, and a hat would negate that? Never mind - mine is not to question the mind of Lila Fowler.
Everyone decides to take scuba diving lessons. The twins are surprised when their parents give them permission (and money) to do this. I'm not - we all know that Ned and Alice are the most irresponsible parents ever. Who gives their mischievous twelve-year-old daughters extra money, especially without even meeting the scuba diving teacher to at least confirm that he is responsible?
Anyway, the teacher turns out to be the same mysterious old man the twins saw on the pier before. His name is Joshua Farrell and he is from Scotland. He tells them, "I ran away to sea when I was a boy. And I never saw my home again." Spooooooooooooky.
Liz goes through the junk she collected from the ocean floor. She keeps most of the stuff but throws away something covered in barnacles which she can't be bothered to clean off. This will be significant later.
The next morning, the twins receive chain letters in the post. I think they should be grateful that this book was written before everybody had internet access, otherwise they'd be stuck spending half an hour adding up the number of letters in their favourite song to reveal the name of their hidden crush, or however those chain emails worked. The letter itself is written in what the writer considers spooooooooooooky language, and the gist of it is this: because someone (read: Liz) has stolen half of something (read: the thing covered in barnacles) from somewhere (read: the bottom of the sea), the letter writer is pissed, and both Liz and Jess must send the letter on to six friends - or never get kissed ever! Just kidding - they'll be "cursed by Carlotta". Predictably, Jess is thrilled and Liz thinks it's nonsense.
Jess decides to send her letters to Steven, Joe and her Unicorn Club friends, and she's going to hand-deliver them as well. I bet her friends hate her. Actually, they don't - at the club meeting, as soon as she mentions the curse to them, they "bent their heads back over their papers and began to scribble". They're all idiots.
Lila comes into the meeting late because she was at a hairdressing appointment. She takes the curse as seriously as the others but because her father's secretary (who handles all her correspondence) is out of town, she can't write the letters yet. That blows. Can Lila literally not write anything without the secretary being around? How does she send out invitations to keep up with the Sweet Valley Party Quota? Lila sensibly says that the curse can wait a few weeks.
That night, Liz has a bad dream. She's on board a ship during a storm, surrounded by pirates. It's Tim Curry and his nefarious band of Muppets! No, not really, but that's cooler than the truth. Liz watches two men swordfight (one of them looks like Joshua Farrell and the other has a red beard) and a woman scream as the ship sinks. Spooooooooooooky. Liz wakes up screaming.
The gang all take the same bus to the beach for their first lesson - even Lila, Janet and Joe, who live on the other side of town from the Wakefields, if I remember my SVT canon correctly. Joe confesses, "I sent [my letters] to all my friends to hate to write and owe me letters. I figured that would pay them back for being such lousy correspondents." Okay, heh. Joe's got the right idea there.
They get to the beach but Joshua Farrell isn't anywhere to be seen. Amy suggests that he decided he didn't want to teach children: "He looked like a pretty crusty old salt to me," she says. That's such a dorky thing to say and I kind of love her for it. Liz volunteers to go and find him in his house and is frightened when she sees a wetsuit floating in midair of its own accord. Spooooooooooooky.
Joshua Farrell finally shows up and the lesson is about to begin, but Lila has lost her expensive watch. Jess thinks that it's because she's cursed. Well, whose fault is that, Jessica? It was you who sent her the stupid letter in the first place.
Jess is sleeping over at Lila's house and is staring enviously around in Lila's bathroom, which is filled with hairdryers, purple towels and telephones. Who has a telephone in their bathroom, other than Joey Tribbiani? Jess is impressed, though, and thinks, I could live happily in Lila's bathroom for the rest of my life. Heh.
Lila breaks a nail, rips her bathrobe, and reveals that she fell down the stairs and slid into the kitchen cabinet earlier that day. This, combined with the loss of her watch, convinces her that she really is cursed, and Jess urges her to write the letters. I have to say, Jess and Lila are really nice to each other in this book. It's a little weird, but I like it - their friendship across the series is awesome. Lila ruins her favourite pen and breaks her dad's computer when trying to write the letters. Apparently the spirit will only accept plain, hand-written letters, which seems a little entitled of it.
Everyone goes scuba-diving. Unfortunately Liz nearly drowns when she sees Joshua Farrell underwater - there's no face in his mask (ykoooooooooooops!) and she panics and blacks out - but even freaking Jessica thinks that she's making it up. Jessica, whose only real action in the book so far is to act as personal cheerleader for the Curse of Carlotta.
The Wakefield parents realise that hey, maybe it wasn't such a great idea to send their three pubescent children off to scuba-dive with a guy they'd never met. That's about as far as it goes, though, as Liz convinces them to let them continue taking lessons. Then Lila comes round and tells the twins that she's grounded - apparently when she was writing the letter out on her dad's computer, she managed to email it (or "download it" through "electronic mail", as the book puts it. Oh, 1995) to everyone in her dad's company.
Liz has another dream, where she sees the red-bearded man and the lady from before on the ship. The man who looks like Joshua Farrell leaves his post on deck. Liz looks around and we get, She crept around the deck, examining the ropes. "Wow. This stuff is interesting," she said out loud. Only Liz would find herself aboard a pirate ship and spend her time checking out the nifty ropework.
The next day at the beach, a scorpion is found in Liz's lunch bag! That's about it, but everyone is more convinced than ever that she is cursed. If I was Liz, I'd write the stupid letters just to shut everyone else up. When Joshua Farrell show up to give them their lesson, Liz suddenly realises that she's not ready yet to go back into the water. This is the only bit of the book to be realistic - after all, the poor kid did nearly just drown out there recently.
A guy called John Filber comes to see the twins. He works for Mr. Fowler and received the chain email Lila sent out, and he's very interested in the Curse of Carlotta as it's "significant" in his family. He wants to take them to the bad part of the beach and tells them that he got their address from the Fowlers' cook. Spoooo- actually, if I were the twins' parents, I would be so pissed with the cook. Who wants some random guy calling up your twelve-year-old daughters and saying that he wants to take them to a shady part of town? The twins are dumb enough to agree to meet him there the following morning.
When they meet Filber the next day, he just wants them to look over the edge of the pier. They see something gleaming in the coral and Filber admits that he doesn't know what it is, but his father brought him to see it, and his grandfather brought his father to see it, and so on. None of them are allowed to touch it, whatever it is, otherwise they'll be cursed by Carlotta. Fine, but I don't see what the twins have to do with this. I mean, for all Filber knows, they just received the chain letter from someone else. He tells them about his dreams and they're the same ones that Liz is having - he's on board a sinking ship and a young couple have been separated. Say it with me: spooooooooooooky.
That evening there's a cookout at the beach and everyone sits around and tells ghost stories. Joshua Farrell is there too, and I have to say that when I was twelve, the last thing I wanted was to hang out with an old guy. My top three topics of conversation at that age were 1) Sweet Valley books, 2) Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and 3) Leonardo diCaprio, and I'd have felt so uncomfortable talking about any of them in front of an old dude. The kids don't seem to feel this degree of awkwardness around him, though, and he starts telling them a story about a dangerous pirate.
His name was Red Beard (sound familiar?) and he wanted to marry the governor's niece, whose name was Carlotta (how about that?). Because "she could never be the wife of a thief and a pirate", Red Beard agrees to stop being one, and, with the governor's blessing, the two of them sail away to the New World. On the way, they split a gold locket the governor gave them in two, each of them wearing one half, but a storm overturns the ship and Red Beard and Carlotta are separated. Apparently it was the bosun's fault, as he was down in the hold looking for Red Beard's treasure map instead of looking out for the reef that the ship crashed into. Joshua Farrell finishes this unlikely story off by saying, "Legend says that the ghost of the bosun can never rest until he has reunited the lovers...by reuniting the heart." This book would be so much better if it involved Johnny Depp and cursed Aztec gold.
Liz finally accepts that maybe she's cursed. She still won't send the stupid letters, though. Instead, she and Jess look through her stuff to see if she's got half of the locket squirreled away somewhere, but they can't find anything. Then Liz gets another letter from Carlotta. She's given up threats and now promises to reward Liz "beyond her dreams". Congrats, Liz - your holier-than-thou attitude frustrates even two-hundred-year-old ghosts. Finally, she works out that the thing she threw into her bin a zillion chapters ago is probably half of the locket.
And it is! What's more, there's half a treasure map on the back. The twins tell Steven everything, and he threatens to tell their parents about them sneaking off to meet Filber because "they need to ground you guys or something" - which is true, but is seriously overestimating Ned and Alice's parenting abilities. He actually harps on about this for about half a page, which is kind of sweet of him.
Liz notes that the map that the bosun was searching for was on the locket rather than down in the hold. This is stupid. Joshua Farrell established in his story that it was the governor who gave Red Beard the locket, and why would the governor know where Red Beard's treasure was? Unless Red Beard had it inscribed later, which is dumb as well. He's meant to be high-tailing it to America with his new piece of ass, not stopping to get his personal effects engraved.
The three of them also realise that the shining thing that Filber showed the twins just off the pier was the other half of the locket. Steve and Jess go gaga over the idea of treasure and Liz disapproves. Shut up, Liz, you think ropes are cool. Liz also finally starts to suspect that Joshua Farrell is actually the ghost of the bosun. Took her long enough. She goes to the library and establishes that this is fact, as well as the fact that the bosun was one of the survivors and that Filber is descended from him.
Liz goes home and takes a nap. She has another dream featuring Carlotta and Red Beard. Carlotta tells her that it's the bosun who's been sending the letters. Also, the bosun's descendants are cursed as well as him. Guess the bosun wasn't too broken up about betraying his shipmates and being responsible for the deaths of his friends to settle down and have a family. Liz realises that she needs to reunite the two halves of the locket as soon as possible.
At the beach, Steven manages to get the half-locket free from the coral. But just as they're about to put the two halves together, up comes Filber! He wants the treasure map as well, you see, and Liz reluctantly hands the locket over, quickly joining it together first so that at least Red Beard and Carlotta can be reunited.
Unfortunately, because of the bosun's family curse, he trips and the locket falls into the water, lost forever. That's a pretty lame curse. "Oh no, I've lost the map leading to treasure I never possessed in the first place! Guess I'll just go back to my cushy job working for one of the richest men in Sweet Valley." I was hoping that he'd be horribly disfigured at the very least. The three kids leave Filber on the pier, and Liz sees Joshua Farrell disappear into the mist. Spooooooooooooky.
Back home, Liz explains everything to Jess and Steven, including the fact that it was Joshua Farrell who was sending the letters. He had seen her get out of the water with the locket and decided to send the chain letters to the twins. Jess and Steven, however, think that this was all just an elaborate prank Liz decided to play on them and pelt her with popcorn. I'd say that any "prank" that involved me nearly drowning would be taking things too far, but whatever.
That night, Liz dreams about Red Beard and Carlotta holding each other in each other's arms on board a clear-sailing ship. They smile at her and then make out. Liz presumably checks out the ropes again. They really are something!
And that's the end of the book. I can't believe that SVT managed to make the concept of cursed pirate treasure even more stupid than it already sounds, but there you go.