There’s no question that the story of the day, probably the week, is Kaavya Viswanathan and how she may have lifted passages from Megan McCafferty’s books, specifically 2001’s SLOPPY FIRSTS. And while the ‘sphere buzzes with schadenfreude, speculation and wonder that this may well be Freywatch redux, what’s lost in the shuffle is the silent middleman in the equation: 17th Street Productions, the book packager responsible for giving the YA world SWEET VALLEY HIGH, GOSSIP GIRL and other YA teen glam books.
Let’s go through the timeline: back in 2004, Visnawathan was a high school senior making use of IvyWise — a five-figure program to help her get into Ivy League schools such as…Harvard. The college counselor she worked with was Katherine Cohen, who also happened to be an author (”Rock Hard Apps: How to Write the Killer College Application”) and represented by Suzanne Gluck at William Morris. Visnawathan showed Cohen some of her writing samples, including a 100-page draft of OPAL MEHTA, and ended up in the hands of Jennifer Rudolph Walsh (best known as James Patterson’s agent.)
Then Walsh turned around and sent Visnawathan to 17th Street Productions, Why? Because as Walsh told the Boston Globe back in February, she didn’t have a “commercially viable” work, having instead written something much darker. 17th Street worked with the young author to “flesh out the concept” of what would become OPAL MEHTA, which sold to Little, Brown on the basis of a few chapters and a detailed plot synopsis.
While the Globe also quoted Visnawathan as saying “In the last few months of my freshman year, I was writing 50 pages every two weeks. It was pretty bad. Every time I wasn’t in classes, I would just write. In the last two weeks of school, I was studying for finals while trying to get the last 50 pages done,” The book clearly would not have seen the light of day without 17th Street’s help. The question is, how far did that help extend? Alloy Entertainment president Leslie Morgenstein refused comment when reached by phone earlier today, and attempts to contact the editor responsible for helping Visnawathan yielded similar results. But at some point it might be wise for them to clarify their involvement in the creation and packaging of OPAL MEHTA, if only because these charges don’t necessarily affect a single individual, but a whole group of them.