Because the first series just wasn’t enough

It’s time to make a shameful admission: I am hopelessly, utterly addicted to Cecily Von Ziegesar’s GOSSIP GIRL series. I’m not totally sure how this happened, but when the first two books had just been released, I was in a bookstore in New York and saw them in the “new releases” pile. Hmm, chatty girls on the cover. Looks like trash. Flashbacks to my ten-year old self and zipping through dozens of Sweet Valley High books. So what the hell. I picked the first one up, and I was hooked. Bitchy high school girls on the Upper East Side, smoking pot, having sex and thinking that everything is Oh So Important. I needed more, and so, when there’s a new book, I snatch it up, read it in about an hour, try very hard not to cackle loudly (since I’m in a public place) and then try not to have withdrawal symptoms. It’s due primarily to the fact that there’s a running dialogue in my head which essentially yells at all the characters for being so silly because they’ll all go to college, make new friends, start experimenting with all sorts of better drugs, weirder sex and other things and just forget that high school was ever so uppermost on their minds.

The thing is, of course, the comparison between SVH and Gossip Girl is no coincidence: both series were the brainchildren of 17th Street Productions, a packaging company that sells ideas to publishers and uses writers-for-hire to bring those ideas to fruition. A bookseller I knew was acquainted with one 17th Street writer (who tried to launch a mystery series written under his name, but because no one could figure out if it was meant for adults or teens, the series died after a couple of installments) who recounted all sorts of stories about working on the GG books, most of them involving snarky comments of some variety or another. Von Ziegesar, it seems, is the Francine Pascal of the 21st century, but younger, hipper, and more with-it. Still, there’s some unintentional hilarity in her official biography–and not only because she hasn’t been 25 in a looooong time.

So I suppose my pseudo-obsession is in due in part to reliving my earlier years of Sweet Valley reading, wondering why the twins really didn’t do very much, and my desire to escape into enjoyable trash. Thus, ever the addict, I’m kind of excited about this:

Cecily von Ziegesar’s new YA series THE IT GIRL, based on one of the lead Gossip Girl characters who ventures off to a top East Coast booarding school, and 3 more books in the GOSSIP GIRL series, again to Cindy Eagan at Little, Brown Children’s, in a major deal, by Sarah Burnes at Burnes & Clegg for Alloy Entertainment (world English).

Ah, more pedestrian prose to mock-satirize, more antics to feel superior about. Bring it on. And oh yeah, installment #6 is out next week.