Teenaged twins Christine and Susan Pratt have agreed to visit and help out their aunt in Los Angeles during the last few weeks of summer vacation before the sisters must head off to New York to pursue higher learning. There's plenty of fun to be had in sunny California, but when the girls meet a movie executive and his daughter who may be in trouble, it could lead to a dangerous caper for the Pratt twins in The Popcorn Project by author Cynthia Blair.

Ah! Yet another delightful dive into upbeat, old-fashioned, total comfort reading for me, pulled from the world of '80s YA.

Yup, this jaunty tale of sisterly derring-do is stretched out here and there with light, unspectacular moments and events that the plot doesn't really need, along with chunks of repetition. In this case, some of that repetition occurs while certain characters spend time telling each other a bunch of stuff they already know, obviously to spell out the story's thread of mystery and its backstory to the reader.

And yup, the novel is thoroughly corny—in the same bright and fun way as every book I've read about the Pratt twins.

I'm still quite glad that in middle school, my adolescent self discovered the first novel about Chris and Sooz, The Banana Split Affair. I had no idea back then that it was the first book in a series: a series my adult self would get to read for nostalgic kicks. ( )