Yesterday, I noted an anonymous reader’s suggestion that the “novelist’s eye for psychological detail” that Michiko Kakutani saw in “Margaret B. Jones‘s” Love and Consequences might at least partially derive from other people’s books, like Sherman Alexie‘s Reservation Blues. Now another voracious reader wonders if Peggy Seltzer‘s descriptions of carrying her personal belongings from one foster home to another in plastic trash bags might have been inspired by Jennifer Lauck‘s bestselling memoir Blackbird… Now, if the things Seltzer writes about had actually happened to her, that would be one thing, but since she’s already admitted to taking other people’s non-literary stories… well, those bags came from somewhere.
If you’re one of the handful of people who managed to get a copy of Love and Consequences before Riverhead yanked it out of circulation, and you spot something in it that reminds you a little too much of another book you’ve read, pass it on!
(photo: Susan Seubert/NYT)