Shannon's Sweet Valley High Blog

The Moral of the Story: If you pretend to be a princess, you’ll get kidnapped for ransom money.

The Big Deal: New York City! Woohoo!

Synopsis:

There’s been an earthquake in Sweet Valley (don’t worry, no refrigerators have fallen on anyone) and the school is going to be closed for a week while the roof is repaired. Lila will be spending the week in New York City and she’s invited Jessica to come along. Lila somehow misses the flight, so Jessica goes alone. She ends up sitting next to Ryder Mitchell, a teen rock star. During the course of the plane ride, Ryder and Jessica fall in love. Of course they do. The plane has to land in New Orleans because of some sort of mechanical difficulties, and Jessica and Ryder go out on the town. Ryder tells Jessica his manager is making him go to New York to announce his engagement to Deirdra La Monde, some other teen sensation. Ryder has only met the chick once and doesn’t even hardly like her, and now that he’s met Jessica he’s decided to call the whole thing off. When they get to New York, Ryder tells Jessica to give him a couple days to let things blow over, and he’ll meet her on Valentine’s Day at the top of the Empire State Building.

Because of Jessica’s plane troubles, Lila gets to the Plaza Hotel first. When she walks in, she’s a little surprised to have a bunch of photographers take her picture, but she really doesn’t think anything of it and chalks it up to people knowing how important she really is. Man, I love Lila, ego and all. The hotel staff keeps calling her “princess” and they give her the penthouse suite. She thinks this is all just as it should be, but she can’t figure out why the desk staff can’t get her messages right. She goes to the hotel restaurant to have dinner and is shocked to see Bo there. He flew in to New York to surprise her, but he’s upset that she blew him off that morning. Lila has no idea what he’s talking about until the next morning when she goes downstairs to the lobby and sees Bo being threatened by a bunch of bodyguards. The bodyguards are surrounding a girl who looks just like Lila. Lila looks at a newspaper and sees a picture of herself arriving at the hotel, but the article is about Princess Charlotte from some nonsense country.

When Jessica arrives, she, Lila and Bo take full advantage of the mix-up. They get excellent treatment everywhere they go. Meanwhile, the real Princess is also taking advantage of this opportunity to hang out in New York without anybody bothering her. She meets a guy named Allan and they work at a soup kitchen together. Hmm, she sounds an awful lot like Princess Eliana. All princesses really have hearts of gold and all they really want is to work in soup kitchens.

On Valentine’s Day, Jessica and Lila spend all day getting ready for their dates and then hop into a cab. The cab is unfortunately being driven by a couple of bad guys who think they’ve kidnapped Princess Charlotte. Bo knows something is wrong when Lila doesn’t show for their date, but the police just think he’s been stood up. Bo, rich as he is, decides to call a television station and buy some ad time. Ryder is in his hotel room feeling sorry for himself when he sees Jessica’s face on TV. He learns that she’s missing and calls the number on the television. Bo tells him to come on over to his hotel room.

The bad guys, Vincent and Mr. G, finally figure out they fucked up and Lila’s not really a princess. They’re all set to kill the girls when Lila tells them she’s the daughter of a wealthy man. The bad guys can’t get a hold of Mr. or Mrs. Fowler, so they think Lila’s lying. Lila tells them about Bo and says he’d pay anything to get her and Jessica back. So they call Bo’s hotel room and tell him to bring a million dollars to Yankee stadium.

Jessica and Lila manage to get themselves untied and then lock the kidnappers in the room. They escape the stadium in the bad guys’ cab, and just miss Bo and Ryder coming in. The boys find the room the kidnappers are locked in, go inside and get clubbed over the head and locked in. Ugh, this is annoying. Jessica and Lila, instead of calling the police, go back to their hotel. Bo isn’t in his room and they run around searching for him. Lila runs into Princess Charlotte. The princess, grateful to Lila for inadvertently giving her a few days of freedom, listens to the girls’ story about their kidnapping and how they now think their boyfriends are being held prisoner. Charlotte sends her very own bodyguards to the stadium and they burst into the storage room just as Vincent and Mr. G are about to kill Ryder and Bo.

A day or two later, Ryder puts on a spontaneous concert at the Empire State Building. Jessica gets to kiss him on stage. It’s all very exciting.

Quotes:

The moment Lila stepped onto the red carpet in front of the hotel, the cameras of dozens of paparazzi started flashing…Lila tossed back her brown hair and waved regally, gracing the photographers with a dazzling smile. This is the kind of welcome I deserve! she thought.

I absolutely love that this is Lila’s reaction to unexpected paparazzi.

The Cover: What a boring cover, especially the inside. I don’t see any reason this one had to be a stepback.

Tags: *Super Edition, Christmas/Winter, Plot: Farfetched

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 12:00 pm and is filed under 1. Original Series. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.