Posted Friday, April 28, 2006, The OG, arts

A week ago Kaavya Viswanathan was on top of the world — a Harvard sophomore wiith a recently published debut novel, a $500,000 book deal, and Hollywood knocking at her door.

Now her publisher has recalled her novel from bookstores, and a book promotion tour of Britain has been canceled — all because of evidence that she plagiarized numerous passages in her novel, “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life.”

Gargoyle reporter Devika Bagchi wrote a review of “Opal Mehta” last week, noting the derivative nature of the book (mainly the obvious influence of “Mean Girls”). The Online Gargoyle posted the review early Monday morning, just in time to find out that The Harvard Crimson had run an article Sunday detailing similarities between “Opal Mehta” and two novels written by Megan F. McCafferty, “Sloppy Firsts” and “Second Helpings.”

Because of the coincidence in timing, The OG has tried to keep readers up to date on important developments in the plagiarism controversy.

Here are excerpts from the most recent Crimson article, written by staff reporter David Zhou and posted late Thursday night:

“The publisher of ‘How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life,' by Kaavya Viswanathan '08, said in a statement today that it has decided to recall all editions of the novel.

“Viswanathan's planned book promotion tour in London has also been nixed, according to Jenny Fry, a publicist for Time Warner Books.

“‘She is not coming over to the U.K. anymore,' Fry said. ‘It is cancelled.'

“Fry declined to comment any further.

“Little, Brown has asked retail and wholesale stores to stop selling the novel, which has been plagued by plagiarism accusations in the past few days, and send back any unsold copies, according to a Little, Brown statement today.”

You can read the Crimson article in its entirety here. You can read a Crimson editorial about the controversy here.

However, the story gets even more interesting with the recent revelation that Viswanathan may not have committed the plagiarism herself — because the novel may have been written in large part by a “book packaging” firm called 17th Street Productions. For that angle of the story, see the coverage in The Harvard Independent, a student weekly.

Coverage in The New York Times can be found here.

— Gargoyle staff