A student author, about to promote her book in the UK, has been accused of plagiarism.
By edward helmore in New York
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Students at Harvard, like students everywhere, are not especially well-known for their charity to one another. When 19-year-old Kaavya Viswanathan flies into London next weekend, she will arrive with the shrill bells of criticism and retribution ringing in her ears.
America's latest chick-lit sensation is coming to promote her precocious first novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. Viswanathan is pretty and accomplished. Her lively, readable book - begun when she was still 17 - has received rave reviews in the US where it was sold to Little, Brown as the first in a two-book deal for $500,000. The movie rights have gone to DreamWorks.
All this good fortune, it seems, is too much for some of her fellow students. Now an enterprising reporter at the Harvard Crimson,
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| Informed of the similarities, Viswanathan said, ‘I have no idea what you are talking about’ |
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the student newspaper, has found similarities between passages in Viswanathan's novel and two novels by another American author, Megan F. McCafferty.
Where McCafferty's first novel, Sloppy Firsts, reads, "Finally, four major department stores and 170 specialty shops later, we were done", Viswanathan writes: "Five department stores, and 170 specialty shops later, I was sick of listening to her hum along to Alicia Keys."
In McCafferty's second work, Second Helpings, she writes: "... but in a truly sadomasochistic dieting gesture, they chose to buy their Diet Cokes at Cinnabon". Viswanathan writes: "In a truly masochistic gesture, they had decided to buy Diet Cokes from Mrs. Fields..."
Informed of the similarities, Viswanathan said, "No comment. I have no idea what you are talking about." McCafferty, a former editor at Cosmopolitan, told the paper gravely: "I'm already aware of this situation... I do hope this can be resolved in a manner that is fair to all of the parties involved." 
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