A few year ago , Kaavya Viswanathan , a hard - driving Amerindic teenage girlfriend who wanted to go to Harvard , scored a vast record book spate at age 17 for " How Opal Mehta Got Kissed ,  Got Wild , and Got a Life , " a sparkling small novel about " ¦ a hard - driving Indian teenage girl who wants to go to Harvard . Asdocumented by the Harvard Crimson this week , it seems that K.V. , now a sophomore at her dear university , did n’t take her breathing in only from her own little aliveness " “ she also ostensibly lifted a good bit of her book from two novels by Megan McCafferty , " Sloppy Firsts " and " Second Helpings . " My initial reaction was as follows :
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scha·den·freu·de
orthoepy : ' shä-d&n-“froi - d&Function : nounUsage : often capitalizedEtymology : German , fromSchadendamage + Freudejoy : enjoyment obtain from the troubles of others
But then I realize that I am 27 and have a career that is just all right and therefore should n’t be jeering at some poor teenage kid who made a silent mistake , even if her first Holy Scripture mickle was right smart bigger than mine will ever be , aaaaarrrrrrgh .
So , anyway . K.V. may feel a scrap friendless right now , but she ’s in good companionship :
Helen Keller was impeach of plagiarism as a vernal girl for a school typography . Mortified , she find out to have all future compositions screened by her friends before submission .
According to a Boston University investigation into pedantic misconduct , Martin Luther King , Jr. plagiarise over one third of the chapter of his doctoral thesis that summarizes the concepts of God expressed by Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman .
In 2002 , good - selling author Stephen Ambrose was accused of plagiarize several passages which he footnote but did not enclose in the habitual quotation marks .
In her 1987 bookThe Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys , Doris Kearns Goodwin interview author Lynne McTaggart and used musical passage from McTaggart ’s book about Kathleen Kennedy with permission . Â
And yes , for those of you who ’ve had your deep brown this daybreak , I did in fact just blatantly lift all that info fromthreeWikipediaentries .
John , as a novelist with a YA specialty yourself , what are your thoughts on this mini - disaster ? Will K.V. write again ? Should she ?
