Charmed Thirds
by Megan McCafferty
4 Stars
In light of recent events, I should probably plagiarize this review. Why, you ask? Charmed Thirds is the third book in Megan McCafferty's series about a suburban New Jersey girl that recently re-climbed the best-seller lists thanks to a Harvard sophomore named Kaavya Viswanthan. For those of you who don't know who or what I'm talking about, I'll summarize briefly: Viswanthan won acclaim for the book she wrote during her freshman year at Harvard called How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. Unfortunately for Viswanthan, fame would become bittersweet when it emerged that she had plagiarized more than forty passages of her book almost word-for-word from Megan McCafferty's first two books in this series: Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings. The Harvard Crimson first broke the scandal a few months ago, when students who had read Viswanthan's book noted striking similarities between Opal Mehta and Sloppy Firsts.
I was first introduced to Jessica Darling, the quick-witted, cynical, and intellectual protagonist of the three novels back in high school. The three books consist of entries in Jessica's journals framed with letters to her best friend who moved to Tennessee (he.nce the root of Jessica's teen angst). Publishers were smart to include the tag line "A Novel" after the titles on the three books' covers because most readers would confuse fiction with autobiography if left to their own demise.
Whereas many authors (J.K. Rowling aside) fail to keep readers interested in their characters by the third entry into a series, the Jessica Darling trifecta is as entertaining as ever in Charmed Thirds. The book is especially applicable to the Penn population since it finds Jessica facing her hardest challenge yet: paying her way through Columbia University and living on her own in New York City, three thousand miles away from the supposed love of her life. Superficially, it seems like an ordinary chick lit novel, but anyone who reads the book will realize that it is so much more. Jessica's journal pages demonstrate the road to self-discovery that every college student goes down whether or not he or she is cognizant of it. McCafferty's tone and quick wit stay strong throughout the novel which, despite coming in at almost four hundred pages, is easily finished in a day or two.
Even if the prospect of reading a book about a girl from suburban New Jersey appeals to you about as much as going to suburban New Jersey (and I'm allowed to make fun because it was my life for eighteen years), give Charmed Thirds a chance. After all, it was good enough for a Harvard student to risk her integrity for, and doesn't that make you the least bit interested in seeing what all the fuss was about?
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