SVT#60: Ciao, Sweet Valley!
Another book about exchange students! And boy, is it ever awesome!
----> My icon is basically the expression on my face as I read this.
Ciao means both hello and goodbye, so I always like to imagine that this title actually means "Goodbye, Sweet Valley (and good riddance, you WASPy bitches)".
The cover isn't too bad. That's Jess in the purple swimsuit. Lila's in the red bikini giving Giovanna the evil eye. The artist has helpfully written 'Italia' on Giovanna's bikini so we know who is who. Giovanna is clearly the property of Liz, who seems very proud to own her own Italian! Put it with her East German doll and her Santa Doran doll. Soon she'll have the whole European set!
Liz has found out about this new program called GO (original), where students can spend THREE WHOLE WEEKS studying in a foreign country. Jessica is so excited! Paris, here they come! But the twins are out of luck- they're monolingual, and you need to be able to speak the language of the country you're going to. Sorry girls, not everyone in the world will speak English just for you. But don't worry Jessica, your time in France will come. Multiple times, even (although one is declared anathema by 1bruce1!)
Instead, Mama Wakefield suggests being a host family to an international student. What a great idea! All you need to do is fill out a form! You figure that they'd have a more stringent application process to be host parents to a young student, seeing as the town's full of... oh, I don't know, RAPISTS and PSYCHOS and MURDERERS, and RAPEY PSYCHO MURDERERS, but whatever.
So they fill out the form. Of course. We wouldn't have a story otherwise.
Next, the exchange guy-in-charge, Mr Lane rings: the Wakefields have a student, named Giovanna Screti. Jessica mishears Mr Lane on the phone and thinks he said Giovanni, so assumes it's a guy. I'm surprised Jess even knew Giovanni was a boy's name. She doesn't seem like she'd know stuff like that. Anyway, the Unicorns are all super excited about it, because of course all Italian guys are hot. They're not sleazy, or greasy-haired ever. ALL are cute. I guess that includes the old Roman man who tried to get me to climb in his car. And the other Roman guy who hit me with his car. They were both superhot.
Lila brags about how she knows all about Italy (for two whole days in Venice, and a day in Rome), and all the guys she saw were cute.
Elizabeth is excited. Maybe Giovanni will turn out to be a prince in disguise too! Yes, she actually says this. This is why I love Sweet Valley. Plus, Jess even thinks how cool it would be if their student was an Italian count. Lila would be so jealous!
She'd pwn you later though, Jessica. She marries one!
Elizabeth is with Amy when she goes to check the mail. Inside is info from Mr Lane, and Liz quickly discovers Jessica's mistake, and she corrects her later that night. Giovanna's a girl, you dick. Jessica is gutted. But then she realises that it will be fun with a girl, and even offers to clean her room so Giovanna can sleep there for half her stay. Take note of this, everyone, it's possibly the ONLY TIME Jessica will ever voluntarily do this, in all of the Sweet Valley serieses- Kids, Twins, Team, Unicorn Club, Jr High, High, Senior Year, University, and probably the Elizabeth series too.
Lila mocks Jess for not knowing the difference between an 'a' and an 'i'. Uh, Lila, hearing on the phone is different to seeing it written down. Lila calls her 'ridicolo'. "Honestly, only someone who didn't know any Italian could make a slip-up like that". Giovanna's from Florence, so Lila quickly chimes in with "Ahhh, Firenze. The City of Seven Hills. Bello, bello."
Ellen then says "I thought Rome was the City of Seven Hills."
Oh Lila. Corrected by Ellen. The Karen of Sweet Valley. Ouch.
Lila then starts bragging about the clothes she bought in Rome that cost a fortune in lire. This book is so dated. It's all about the Euro now! Plus, Ellen mentions that Lila messed up a quiz question on Amerigo Vespucci in history that day. Guess Lila's not the smoking hot expert on Italy that she claims to be. More Lila-pwning will come later. Lots more. It's so funny. I usually love Lila, but she deserves a good burn now and then.
The twins borrow a 'cot' (which makes me think of a baby cot, haha) from an elderly lady who lives down the street. Coincidentally, her family is Italian, from Sicily. Mrs Dalone (old lady) is keen to meet Giovanna when she comes to town, and loans the twins the cot. I love borrowing bedding from random strangers, don't you? Yum.
Mrs Dalone also shows the twins pictures from when her mother lived in Sicily. The pictures are old, and the kids in the photos are all barefoot and ragged, and they have chickens and goats. Ew. How medieval! They have an old wooden machine for crushing grapes, and all the children worked in the fields instead of going to school. Jessica is horrified. Is this what Italy is like!? Giovanna's going to be some hobo farm girl! Maybe she's coming to America because it's "the land of opportunity and electric lights".
Um...
The Wakefields drive to the airport to collect Giovanna. Apparently there's direct flights to Sweet Valley from Florence. Coz there's no reason to go to L.A., then catch a connecting flight. Riiiight. Anyway, Giovanna arrives and Jess quickly sees that a makeover is pointless, because Giovanna is "as tall and elegant as a fashion model". Plus she's wearing an awesome leather jacket. Giovanna's English is average to poor at first, and Jess starts worrying that Giovanna just memorised a bunch of stuff from a guidebook, and she actually sucks. She says stuff like "It makes bad weather today, is it not so?"
Jess and Liz discuss Giovanna over cups of hot chocolate with whipped cream and a plate of choc chip cookies at 10pm that night. How those girls aren't fat, I don't know. Bulimia, probably.
Turns out Giovanna was just tired and her English is pretty decent. Except for compound words, she has to have them explained. To her, a pancake is a "cake made in a pan?", a strawberry is a "berry in the straw?" and cornflakes are... yep "flakes of corn?" This, I think, is very stupid, because she likely would have learned food words in class. When I hear people say "pomme de terre" I don't immediately think "apple of the ground" or whatever; I do know it's a potato. And my French is far worse than Giovanna's English. I'm guessing the ghostwriter hasn't tried learning a language.
Jessica is super jealous. Giovanna drinks coffee at home, and wine, and she rides a scooter! But here in America, the fruit isn't fresh like Italy and the coffee tastes weird (Italian cappuccino vs American filter coffee? I go with Giovanna!). Steven offers Giovanna a basketball lesson, and out they go.
The twins and Giovanna go for a walk downtown with Mandy Miller and Maria Slater. Giovanna's English is quickly improving, and she's impressed with how big the cars and trucks and office buildings are in Sweet Valley. In Florence the streets are too narrow- it makes "traffic jelly", which is the best phrase ever. Giovanna cracks up when she discovers that the oldest building in Sweet Valley is over 200 years old. When she tells them the Pantheon is over 2000 years old, Jessica says "It's about time you built a new one." She reckons Italy's weird. Well Jess, I think you're ignorant. Each to their own.
Jessica and Elizabeth cook up an "authentic" Italian feast of spaghetti and meatballs with Italian sauce, garlic bread, salad with Italian dressing, and a lovely little Italian flag centrepiece. Why the fuck do these kids always feel they have to welcome foreigners with an inferior imitation of their home country? No spaghetti two 12-year-olds make is going to be an amazing as authentically authentic Italian pasta. They are actually disappointed when they ask Giovanna if it tastes like Italian spaghetti and she says no. They use canned tomatoes, for Jebus's sake! Do you think Italians use CANNED tomatoes? Plus, the spaghetti's too soft. It needs to be chewy. Jess thinks this is crazy talk- she's obviously never heard of al dente. It's much better for your GI levels if it's not all soft. Liz claims she got the recipe from an Italian cookbook. LIES. If it were an Italian cookbook, the recipes would be in Italian. Plus, the bread is French and the salad is not served last, and Parmesan cheese doesn't come in green cans (oh, amen). Oh, and the worst faux pas? The Italian flag is backwards. It's actually green, white and red, not red, white, green. The awesome thing is, Mr Wakefield compliments the centrepiece before Giovanna shoots it down. So really, the twins fail all around, but that's what you get for cooking spaghetti for someone bred on the stuff.
Lila humiliates herself when she walks up to Giovanna at school and says "Buon giorno, mi chiamo Lila Fowler." I'm sure you can guess what that means, but the book gets Ellen to translate for Jessica anyway. How the fuck does Jess not even know that? Did she not make any effort? Giovanna replies in a "rapid stream" of Italian, and Lila just stands there, before asking Giovanna to go slower. Giovanna speaks really slowly, but Lila still can't get it, and she's quickly exposed as the Italy-fraud she is. To save herself, she says she's been to lots of Italian cities, so Giovanna assumes she's been to Florence, and asks if she liked it. Didn't go. Pisa, for the Tower? Didn't go. Tuscany, for the wine? Didn't go. But she went to Venice and Rome! Giovanna smiles, and says she hopes Lila will come back to Italy and see what it's really like. Lila is seething. Jess and Ellen are trying hard not to laugh on pain of death.
Jake Hamilton, Lila's "boyfriend" shows up, and both he and Bruce Patman start talking to Giovanna. Over the next few days, she's got guys all over her, including Janet Howell's boyfriend Denny, and Jessica's boyfriend Aaron Dallas! The boys seem to have no idea how pissed off their girlfriends are getting, and it makes me wonder whether the boys are even aware they're meant to be dating these Unicorns, or if they were just never told and it's just this fantasy the girls live in without the guys knowing. I bet they don't even realise. Heh.
The twins have a pool party for Giovanna, and she's stealing the show in a bright red bikini. Then Lila shows up in the exact same bikini, after she was told by the saleslady that it's one of a kind. HUMILIATION! The boys are all enjoying Giovanna's hotness, and she genuinely likes talking to them, because they have interests and stuff in common, like tennis, car racing, and bike racing. She kicks Bruce's ass at tennis. Mwahahaha. Janet and the girls are all jealous or Giovanna, and get angry when Jessica defends her.
But then both twins are unimpressed when they take her to meet Mrs Dalone and Giovanna insults her without realising. Giovanna corrects the pronounciation of her name (it should be pronounced Dalona- y'know, like lasagne). Giovanna doesn't recognise Mrs Dalone's "Italian" cakes; apparently they're Sicilian, which is more like Greek food. Mrs Dalone says something in Italian to her, which she can't understand, because it's Sicilian Italian, and so it's different from Florentine Italian- not as "pure". This reminds me of the book Looking For Alibrandi, where the main character, Josie, is of Sicilian descent and she says she never fitted in with the other kids of Italian descent because Silicians weren't "proper" Italians or something. North vs South snobbery, I think. Good book, though.
Jess keeps using various excuses to get out of having Giovanna stay in her room, but the time comes where Doormat Liz has had enough, and makes Jess take her. Apparently GIovanna is a complete slob and leaves her stuff everywhere and loses Liz's stuff. Sounds familiar.
Giovanna calls homework "housework" by accident, and doesn't really get what the difference is. There's not much of a difference, Jessica says. Neither one is any fun. Amen.
Jake shows Giovanna basketball and Aaron takes her bowling. The girls are furious. She's stealing their men! Jessica gets really pissed when she sees Giovanna and Aaron at the mall eating icecream. So the Unicorns plan revenge. Giovanna has to say a speech in English class, and so Lila offers to take it home and type it up (on her typewriter!) and proofread it for Giovanna, but in ACTUALITY she's changing it all. Lila shows up for class at the last possible minute so Giovanna doesn't have time to read it before saying it. Lila's made the whole speech say how average Italy is and how supreme America is in every possible way- fashion is more advanced, architecture is better, food is better (the lies make Baby Jesus cry!!). Giovanna is humiliated, and yells at Jessica for being "locked-minded."
Liz comes home to find Giovanna packing. Apparently she wants to go home early because she hates Sweet Valley. She seriously can't handle a few more days? You're only here for three weeks total! Jessica arrives home and Elizabeth confronts her. Giovanna discovers that Liz was getting annoyed at Giovanna in her room, and is hurt. Then the three start fighting. Jess and Liz yell at Giovanna for insulting Mrs Dalone, and Giovanna says she didn't realise she was insulting her. Everyone starts calming down, and the truth is revealed! Giovanna wasn't flirting, and she doesn't want to steal all the boys. She just likes them because they're friendly. Also, Giovanna is a slob coz she has a maid, and so has learned no basic cleaning skills. I swear she's just Italian!Lila. Giovanna promises to apologise to Mrs Dalone, because she didn't mean to be rude to her. Giovanna likes loads of stuff about America, and only talks about Italy because she misses it.
Duh.
Giovanna lists all the stuff she likes about America, and then asks Jessica and Liz to say what they like about Italy. All they can think of is Puccini (you know, as in Madame Butterfly, the opera). Giovanna cracks up. Even she doesn't like Puccini! The twins realise how closed-minded they've been about learning about Italy, and they all apologise and get along again. Plus it turns out Giovanna was only with Aaron at the mall so he could help her pick presents for the twins. Liz gets an Italian-English dictionary and a glossy book about Florence, and Jess gets an red bikini just like Giovanna's and Lila's. Aaron helped pick that out? Hmmm....
Giovanna apologises to Mrs Dalone, who then announces that she's going to Italy for a visit! Yay! And to top off the awesomeness, Giovanna loans Jessica her leather jacket. Life is perfect once again.
Oh yeah, and there's a whole side plot to lead into the next book, where two teachers are plotting something and Giovanna says they're in love, so the Unicorns buy them a wedding presents and yell it out in the cafeteria, but it turns out the teachers are just planning a school science program. Ha ha.
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loubeelou) wrote in ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
1bruce1,
