I believe everyone has at least one piece of media that got something so impossibly, unbelievably wrong that the utter stupidity stays with you forever and all it takes is one little reminder for you to go flying off the handle and start foaming at the mouth, screaming "THAT'S NOT HOW THAT WORKS"
For me, as a child in the 90s who devoured every piece of pulp fiction kid lit on the library shelves, that media was a seemingly innocuous Sweet Valley Twins title: The Incredible Madame Jessica
The Incredible Madame Jessica was published in 1996. Though the characters of the Sweet Valley twins were created by Francine Pascal, the writing of the series is credited to Jamie Suzanne. Jamie Suzanne is not an actual person, but rather a pen name used by multiple ghostwriters, some of whom are listed on Wikipedia. Unfortunately, I'm unsure which of the ghostwriters is responsible for this particular book. I've heard that the name on the dedication page tends to be the name of the ghostwriter, but the dedication is to "Bradley Scott Halpern," and I can't find any writer by that name, ghost or otherwise.
So, unfortunately, we have a nameless ghostwriter to blame for this upcoming atrocity. The editors also deserve to be shamed in the streets, but they are not credited and my searches for the editors of children's pulp fiction from the nineties have not been fruitful.
Things begin innocently enough, with the members of the Unicorn Club planning their booth for the Sweet Valley Middle School Fair. They're setting up a dunk tank, but with a signature Unicorn twist!
Jessica, as you may have gathered from the title and cover, sets up a fortune telling booth instead. Her fellow Unicorns vow to make their Jell-O dunk tank put Jessica's stupid idea to shame. But there's just one little problem:
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that everyone stares at Mandy with disgust, asks how she didn't learn that red and BLUE make purple back in preschool, and kick her out of the Unicorn Club for bringing shame upon them all.
Sorry to dash your dreams again, but Janet did not, in fact, just remember basic kindergarten lesson plans and realize that red and green make brown. No, her concern is only that five massive bags of Jell-O will still not fill a whole dunk tank.
Now, before anyone gets smart and tells me that in some cultures, green is just considered a shade of blue, I am aware. But I have looked up every known ghostwriter for this series and none of them are from such a culture.
Similarly, you might want to give the author the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they're colorblind. Maybe they meant to write "berry blue," but then hit their head and typed "lime" repeatedly in its place. And either of those is possible, I suppose, but the book still had editors. How did no one step in and say "This is some hogwash"?
And the final nail in the coffin, in case you were holding out hope that the Jell-O would come out brown and the characters would learn an important lesson about paying attention in art class:
You know what the worst part of all of this is? I thought, because my brain still couldn't fully grasp the stupidity at play, that blue Jell-O must not have existed in 1996, and therefore the ghostwriter, not wanting to mislead the children on Jell-O flavors, went with the next best thing instead of just having the characters mix strawberry gelatin with blue food coloring.
But no, berry blue Jell-O was introduced in 1992, FOUR YEARS BEFORE THIS ABOMINATION
To this day, I am filled with rage. Had I know how to look up Random House's mailing address back in the nineties, they would have received a scathing letter of complaint. I'm still so mad about it that I ordered a copy of this failure of quality control off the Internet just so I could photograph it and prove to you this wasn't a fever dream.
This isn't a self-published work from a vanity press. It had to have an editor. MULTIPLE EDITORS. But no one cared to correct even the most obvious of flaws, because it's just junk to keep the kids quiet for a while, so who cares?
No matter how badly you fuck up in your own writing, no matter how ashamed you feel for putting out a chapter with a typo, comfort yourself with the knowledge that at least you didn't do this.