NEW YORK (AP) – Francine Pascal, a onetime cleaning soap opera author whose “Candy Valley Excessive” novels and the continued adventures of twins Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield and different teenagers captivated hundreds of thousands of younger readers, has died at age 92.
Pascal died Sunday, her writer, Penguin Random Home, mentioned. It didn’t instantly have extra info Tuesday.
Beginning in 1983, Francine Pascal oversaw the completion of greater than 150 “Candy Valley Excessive” tales with the assistance of others. They had been set in an imaginary Los Angeles suburb, considered one of “gently rolling hills” and a “improbable white sand seaside” close by. In greatest sellers comparable to “Double Love,” “Energy Play” and “All Night time Lengthy,” the Wakefield ladies and their schoolmates navigate relationship, household conflicts, sibling rivalries, extra troubling themes comparable to race, divorce and mortality and even vampires and werewolves.
“Candy Valley is the essence of highschool – similar web site,,” Pascal instructed Individuals journal in 1988. “It´s that second earlier than actuality hits, if you actually do imagine within the romantic values – sacrifice, love, loyalty, friendship – earlier than you get jaded and slip off into maturity.”
Her books bought greater than 200 million copies, and included “Candy Valley” spinoffs and sequels. After the preliminary novels took off, Pascal introduced in outdoors writers, offering them normal outlines and a “bible” of the books’ characters.
“It was principally very younger, new writers,” she instructed Entertainment Weekly in 2019. “The story outlines weren´t chapter by chapter, extra like acts: You get from right here to right here within the first quarter, then it’s a must to get from right here to right here. Don´t overlook, they already had the bible, the place I had written deeply into the lives of the twins and their backgrounds. With the characters, you knew what they appreciated, you knew what the partitions of their room (regarded like), each single factor about them.”
Born Francine Paula Rubin, Pascal was a New York Metropolis native who studied journalism at New York College, wrote for such magazines as Cosmopolitan and Women’ House Journal and, with second husband John Pascal, discovered work with the cleaning soap opera “The Younger Marrieds.” When Francine Pascal started pondering of making her personal collection, she took a buddy’s recommendation and developed what turned the Candy Valley books.
The idea: “Dallas” for younger individuals. The principle characters: twin sisters, one mischievous (Jessica), the opposite extra wise (Elizabeth).
“There are loads of twins in my life,” she instructed Leisure Weekly. “My sister-in-law was a twin. Persons are all the time fascinated by twins. You´ll by no means be alone.”
Pascal and her first husband, Jerome Offenberg, divorced in 1963. They’d three daughters, considered one of whom, Jamie, died in 2008. John Pascal died in 1981.
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