<p>Just read an article in the NYT about a new (fiction) book about college admissions - "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life" written by Kaavya Viswanathan, a sophomore at Harvard. The book is about to be released. Interesting article, could be a fun read. Apparently, the author's parents used Katherine Cohen to coach their daughter and, after reading some of the Kaavya's work, Ms. Cohen contacted her literary agent about Kaavya.</p>
<p>Along that note, there is a great book out called Admissions that profiles a private K-8 NYC day school and there are career coaches for the preK crowd as well as of course the secondary students.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.nysun.com/article/12648%5B/url%5D">http://www.nysun.com/article/12648</a></p>
<p>New York, April 22, 2005
BY PRANAY GUPTE
- Special to the Sun</p>
<p>Kaavya Viswanathan is set on becoming an investment banker when she graduates from Harvard University in 2008, but a phone call that the 17-year-old freshman received from a literary agent might just cause a change in her plans.</p>
<p>The agent, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh of the William Morris Agency, told the Franklin Hills, N.J.-born Ms. Viswanathan that Little Brown & Company, one of the oldest and most prestigious American publishers - now part of the Time Warner Group - agreed to a two-book deal with the teenager. The sum approached $500,000, a staggering amount for an unpublished writer, let alone someone who'd barely left home for college.</p>
<p>As Opal struggles to adjust the mask, Ms. Viswanathan loses track of her own, revealing a writer whos not just misguided but punitivea writer who fits all her characters into well-worn teen-drama archetypes and then condemns them for being formulaic.</p>
<p>That said, everything that is or does anything in this novel is a cliché. Ms. Viswanathans characters are all caricatures, her plot points are all lifted from moviesthough, for what its worth, she never conceals her influences. In fact, she refers to them incessantly.</p>
<p>Opal takes cues from shows like The OC, Laguna Beach and The Real World. The wild house party she throws near the end of the book is explicitly compared to movies like Cant Hardly Wait, Sixteen Candles, Risky Business, Road Trip and Ferris Buellers Day Off. Before her big date with the student-council president, her parents provide her with a few possible plans of action, the first of which comes from Shes All That (convince Jeffs best friend to bet him that he cant turn you into the prom queen), the second from Ten Things I Hate About You and the third from The Skulls. Right before Opal leaves the house, her mother tells her to titillate her date by channeling Cruel Intentions.</p>
<p>It makes you wonder whether the editors over at Little, Brown were making similar suggestions to Ms. Viswanathan. Opal Mehta is an unabashed rewrite of Tina Feys Mean Girls, diluted with ethnic complications via Bend It Like Beckham, and filled in lengthwise with a pastiche of every high-school drama ever shown on the Disney Channel.</p>
<p>If only theyd sent the porpoise in six months earlier, Bergen County and American youth in general might have been spared the shame of being turned yet again into an ephemeral, MTV-based parody of itself. Opal Mehta is supposed to be émigré chick-lit; instead its confirmation, delivered from the regrettably reliable mouth of a Harvard student, that being a high-school kid has become boring.</p>
<p>I can't help think there are more worthy writers out there stuggling to get a book deal. This has the stink of nepotism/cronyism.</p>