OK so I only bought it and read it because I found out it ripped off a book I really liked. As a ripoff, I could see that yes, there were a lot of parts where Kaavya Viswanathan took way too much inspiration from other authors, and that's awful. But to Viswanathan's credit, there were some parts that seemed to be more of the victim of general YA cliches.
But don't worry, you can just dislike this book on the simple fact that as a book, it isn't very good. I really didn't like this book. As a stand alone book, I didn't like it. I didn't like how cheap the story was, how one dimensional almost every character was (except maybe one or two of the characters were MAYBE two dimensional but is that even really saying anything?), how quickly dated it seemed with all the topical media name dropping (watching TRL and The OC, listening to 50 Cent and The Killers), and how much the author wanted to make love to and suck up to Harvard.
Though I only read one of the books that this this book is said to have plagiarized from, I don't see how people who initially read this book didn't see that it was a pretty big ripoff of "Mean Girls". A much dumber, less funny, not really self-aware and much less tongue-in-cheek ripoff of "Mean Girls" (which was not a movie that "Opal" watched or name dropped which surprised me considering, again, it ripped off that movie so much and this book seemed to like to name drop topical things all the time).
So the story: Opal Mehta has always dreamed of going to Harvard, her (and her parents') dream college. On the day of her interview with the Dean of Admissions, she bombs the interview when he asks her what she does for fun, because Harvard, Opal is informed, is more than just about high academics. She and her parents want her to get into Harvard so much that they decide that Opal's senior year of high school is the perfect opportunity to show off that Opal can be a popular and wild teenager who parties. Thus, they decide to start on Project HOWGAL (How Opal Will Get A Life) where Opal gets a makeover to look and dress like how popular girls look and dress. She also fits in study sessions into being cool by watching reality tv shows, listening to popular music, and reading fashion magazines as a way to figure out to fit in with the popular crowd at school. Opal then goes through an identity crisis, finds out the guy she likes is shallow (which really only gets probably five pages worth of attention if we are to grab all of that subplot together), ends up liking the guy who she didn't initially like (because he's the only one who sees through what she's doing but then gets all righteous and angry at her when he finds out she's been faking her way all along...ulgh that bit of manure was so stupid, I really hated it, let's just say) but there's a misunderstanding that I just could NOT believe. I was annoyed I wanted to toss my book across the room.
I found the behavior of every single character to be so cartoonish that I couldn't take this book seriously. If we are supposed to get the message that you are better off as yourself, why are we suffering through an episode of every high school tv show/every high school movie ever? Perhaps if the characters had more depth, and were more believable perhaps this book could have been better. But like many high school tv shows and many high school movies, everything is sugarcoated and all the characters fall into stereotypes and there is nothing outside of said stereotype. I couldn't honestly believe that Opal and her parents would be so oblivious as to what the Dean of Admissions meant when he told Opal that she should have a life outside academics. Why would they want or even consider going to such extremes to prove a point? It wasn't as if the Dean told Opal that only popular kids got accepted. How could any logical human being misunderstand what the Dean was asking of Opal? Oh right, I'm sorry, this is a story of no logic, just a lot of stupid people forcing stupid situations upon this story, because...that's what teens like, right?
And then to find out that a large chunk of these passages and this storyline were taken from various sources, it just makes this book seem especially terrible and unnecessary.
I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone, unless you want to read it from morbid curiosity since there was a lot of controversy when this book was revealed to be a huge pile of plagiarism. But even then, I don't really think it's worth it.
- Hardcover: 312 pages
- Publisher: Little, Brown; 1st edition (2006)
- Language: English
- ASIN: B002HVPMSK
- Package Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
- Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
- Customer Reviews: 15 customer reviews
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,963,171 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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