May 5, 2006

'How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life'

By PAULA WASLEY

WHAT IT IS: A novel by Kaavya Viswanathan, a Harvard sophomore, about a high-school senior's outlandish strategy for getting into Harvard.

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OUR EXPERT: Jerome Karabel, a sociology professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and author of The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, who responded to questions we had e-mailed to him.

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In the novel: Since kindergarten, Opal Mehta has followed a plan,

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