How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life / Signed / ARC / Uncorrected Proof

New York: Little Brown & Company, 2006. Author-signed ARC and Uncorrected proof; First Edition, First Printing, so stated, but of course as ARC/proof this precedes the trade first edition. No ISBN yet at the time this was printed, but it would become 0316059889. Signed by the author on the second half-title page (in the case of the ARC, this is 2 pages after the title page). Also laid in is a COA from an autograph examiner, but Viswanathan's child-like hand is well-known here in any case. Cover design, though not credited in this ARC, by Marie Mundaca. Fine. Octavo, 312 pp. (two less pages than the later hardcover); fronted by a somewhat gushing introduction letter from Little Brown's Michael Pietsch, which presumably later was something of an embarrassment for him. A very rare signed Advance Review Copy and "proof made from author's manuscript" of Kaavya Viswanathan's controversial expedition into - was it plagiarism ? - of two of Megan McCafferty's neo-chick-lit novels. Passages in in the freshman Harvard prodigy's novel are so similar to parts of McCafferty's "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings." -in some cases, nearly verbatim- that intentional plagiarizing seemed to many to be beyond credibility, lending perhaps-undeserved credence to apologists' theories. Some of those were rather outre: the possibility that the plagiarism was unconscious, that she had been so pressured to succeed since birth by her success-fixated family that "borrowing" was a learned habit. A "Stepford Plagiarism" variation on that latter even posited that such borrowing is actually psychologically programmed in some children in those circumstances, to the degree that they don't even notice doing it, or at least don't perceive it as an unacceptable action. The reaction was, in fact, far more interesting than a genre book itself could possibly be (inquire for balance of description; insufficient space here).