When I heard that Diablo Cody had signed on to write the big-screen version of my beloved Sweet Valley High series, I died a little inside. In a good way. You see, I’m such a hardcore SVH fan that I collect the series and read them on the regular. I am still not over the butchering that occurred when SVH became a TV show, starring a bunch of losers who had no business tainting Francine Pascal’s vision. However, Diablo Cody I trust. Mostly. I’m thrilled to learn that the film will be taking place in the ‘80s, which means it will, hopefully, be inspired aesthetically by the original book covers, recognizable by their soft-focus-colored pencil drawings. However, I’m concerned that Diablo might need help casting the film. I’ll never forgive her if Lila Fowler is played by, shudder, Megan Fox, or Bruce Patman’s brawny bad boy is ruined by faux badass Shia LeBeouf.

OK people, fess up. You’ve read a Sweet Valley High book. Some of you may have breezed through all 152 tomes, while others of you may have stopped in for classics like Elizabeth’s Super-Selling Lemonade or Jessica Quits the Squad. Sure, the series about a pair of blond, Californian twins was no Nancy Drew, but I still adored these books growing up. I always identified with Elizabeth, the older (by four minutes) twin who wrote for the Sweet Valley High newspaper and dreamed of being a journalist, though I definitely had streaks of Jessica, the flighty, boy-crazy twin, too. So I am very excited to tell you that Sweet Valley High is heading for the big screen and ... (wait for it) ... Diablo Cody will be writing the script as well as producing. We hope this means that the tone of the movie will be midway between the saccharine flavor of the original books and the possessed man-eating of “Jennifer’s Body.”

During my junior high/early high school years, I consumed young adult series like my life depended on it. Maybe in a way, it did. I read obsessively about my favorite characters and their packed weekend social schedules of dances, pool parties, tropical vacations, exciting dates, beach parties….trouble was that I was spending my weekend nights reading about these events. The conundrum is that the girls reading these books were the bookish, indoor type—not the ones out and living this life.

My books were my only clues to how to meet and talk to boys. In my endless pawing over my glossy-covered series, my impressionable mind sensed some distinct themes.

I basically lived for reading Sweet Valley High when I was in elementary school—as I previously wrote, SVH #3 Playing With Fire was the first time I read the word “breast” in print in a somewhat sexual way. I remember vividly thinking that SVH was the way high school would be like, in a wonderful dream world, and in order to be a part of that dream, I would need to be “a perfect size six” just like Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield. Make that a “perfect size four.” The books are getting a major makeover—when Random House re-releases the series, they are giving the books new covers (featuring soap star Levin Rambin as the twins) AND updating some of the content so they’re not so ‘80s. Oh and they’re trimming a size off Liz and Jess, because everyone knows that four is the new six and six is fat. That was sarcasm, by the way. [Feministing]

Whoa. We totally just found our favorite new blog (besides The Frisky, of course!)—a San Francisco writer named Casey is rereading and recapping the entire Sweet Valley High series. On the off chance a few of you readers weren’t fans of the series, it was the book series for tweens growing up in the ‘80s and provided loads of thinly veiled sexual innuendo that overwhelmed our sense of what life would be like once we got our period. The series followed identical twins (twins were a big thing in the ‘80s) Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield around their totally perfect town in California. Both of the twins were blond, with green-blue eyes and size-six figures, which permanently imprinted in our brains that a six was the size to be if we were going to be popular in high school.