McCafferty vs. Viswanathan

So this now sophomore at Harvard recently had a young adult novel published and it's come out that there are many similar paragraphs to Megan McCafferty's Sloppy Firsts. For instance:

McCafferty's book, page 6: "Sabrina was the brainy Angel. Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: Pretty or smart."

Viswanathan's novel, page 39: "Moneypenny was the brainy female character. Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: smart or pretty."

I haven't read either book involved (although Sloppy Firsts has been on my "to be read" list for a while) but from what they're showing, it looks pretty fishy. I could imagine it being a coincidence or unintentional or whatever if there was maybe one similar paragraph, but there seem to be a lot of examples where it is very much the same. It makes me think that she probably only got into Harvard from plagiarizing papers.

It reminds me of the type of papers everyone probably wrote in high school. You'd take paragraphs from books and just change the wording around slightly and think that that was ok and not plagiarism when really it is. That's what this reminds me of.

And anyways, what in the hell is a 17 year old doing with a $500,000 book deal anyways? And where's mine?

Yesterday my mom was in her room listening over and over to the song Celebration (Kool & the Gang). But it wasn't even the real song...it was the Dora the Explorer Version. After 45 minutes of hearing it over and over I finally get up and go see what in the hell she's doing. She is sitting there with a pencil and notebook transcribing the song. And, since she doesn't know how to work the cd player to make it pause or rewind slightly, she keeps having to go back to the beginning. I went to the computer typed the song title into google and came back 2 minutes later with all of the lyrics. She then took the paper down to the computer to type them up.