Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan has admitted to "accidentally" borrowing material for her first novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, after the Crimson identified more than a few passages in Opal that mirrored Megan McCafferty's work in Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings. In a statement issued by her publisher Little, Brown, Viswanathan admitted that she had read Megan McCafferty's books in high school and acknowledged the similarities:

What happens when you sign a high school kid to a $500K two-book deal? We wouldn't know, being reasonably untalented since elementary school. But ask the sad folks at Little, Brown — they signed Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan to that exact deal, and her debut, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, seems to feature plagiarized content. Currently at #32 on the New York Times bestseller list and optioned by Dreamworks, Opal Mehta contains "strikingly similar" (and, at one point, word-for-word) text to Megan McCafferty's 2001 novel Sloppy Firsts and her 2003 follow-up Second Helpings. McCafferty's people at Random House are taking the allegations "very seriously," but when contacted by the Harvard Crimson, Viswanathan said that she had "no idea what you are talking about."