In many ways, parallels in 'Opal,' 'Sloppy Firsts' are striking

At first glance, Kaavya Viswanathan's debut novel, ''How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life," seems like a completely different tale of teen angst from ''Sloppy Firsts," Megan McCafferty's 2001 first novel. ''Opal" is about an Indian-American girl who, in a quest to get into Harvard, endeavors to become a social success. ''Sloppy Firsts" follows the travails of an adolescent athlete struggling to cope with losing her best friend, who has moved away.

But, in addition to numerous places where ''Opal" contains strings of words and phrases that also appear in ''Sloppy Firsts," some of Viswanathan's characters also mirror McCafferty's first novel, as well as her second installment in the series, ''Second Helpings." Yesterday, Viswanathan acknowledged she ''read and loved" both of McCafferty's books while she was in high school and ''may have internalized her work" -- and clearly, the parallels are striking.

Opal Mehta and McCafferty's heroine, Jessica Darling, are first-person narrators, both superachiever teens from New Jersey who fall head over heels for a boy whose troublemaker exterior hides his keen intelligence.

Both heroines refer to the in-crowd at their school as the ''Upper Crust" and low-lifers as ''dregs." The clique of girls in both heroines' lives includes a former elementary school friend of the heroine, a buxom flirt, and an Italian-American with a penchant for tanning. Both bad-boy love interests have tried '' 'shrooms," play the guitar, and wear faded Vans sneakers and shirts emblazoned with a day of the week.

Many of these characters are cliches of the teen angst genre, familiar figures to anyone who has seen the movies ''Mean Girls," ''Clueless," or ''The Breakfast Club." But similarities between some of the passages in Viswanathan's newly published first novel and McCafferty's work only seem to underscore their parallels.

Mehta's mother, for example, convinced that her studious daughter will be rejected from Harvard unless she takes the advice of an admissions officer and gets a life, uses a digital camera to take pictures of popular students, so she can give her daughter the perfect makeover. Darling's father splices together videos of her defeats at track meets and replays them obsessively to show her how to improve her performance.

Mehta's crush, Sean, smells ''sweet and woodsy and spicy, like the sandalwood key chains sold as souvenirs in India." Darling's love interest, Marcus, smells ''sweet and woodsy, like cedar shavings."

In ''Second Helpings," McCafferty writes of the Italian-American member of Darling's clique: ''Tanning was the closest that Sara came to having a hobby, other than gossiping or surfing pro-ana websites, that is. . . . Even the webbing between her fingers was the color of coffee without cream."

Viswanathan's Stacie, a member of Mehta's clique who is also of Italian heritage, flaunts the same look: ''It was obvious that next to casual hookups, tanning was her extracurricular activity of choice. Every visible inch of skin matched the color and texture of her Louis Vuitton backpack."

There are also numerous passages where the rhythm and structure of Viswanathan's prose, if not the words themselves, closely resemble McCafferty's -- almost as if Mehta momentarily channeled Darling's voice.

At one point in ''Sloppy Firsts," for example, Darling describes her conversations with Marcus as being ''like a shot of Schnapps with a Tabasco sauce chaser. Short, sweet, and strange, as well as capable of making me hot, wobbly, and confused."

Mehta says her talks with Sean are ''like eating sev mixture, the Indian equivalent to Chex Party Mix, sharp and sweet and spicy all at once, with every bite containing a new mixture of ingredients."

A bit later, Darling gives more details about her discussions with Marcus: ''For 1 hour and 47 minutes, we proved him right. Here, an incomplete list of topics from tonight's convo: pregnant chads; the Olsen Twins; the AIDS epidemic in Africa; fake tattoos; Igpay Atinlay; the universe's unseen dimensions; cloning; cliched guitar Gods in leather pants; year-round schooling; plastic surgery junkies; Napster."

Mehta, meanwhile, relates: ''[W]e kept talking. In fact, we talked for another forty-nine minutes about the following topics: stem-cell research, how expensive a new amp for his guitar would be, the state of the Vatican, old Hollywood actresses dating men young enough to be their sons, overpriced white T-shirts at Neiman Marcus, constitutional amendments against gay marriage, and iPod nanos."