YMMV / How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life

• Cliché Storm: Besides the plagiarism, many people who read the book have noted it comes off as a highly predictable coming-of-age comedy about a nerdy girl who tries get In with the In Crowd and discovers who she really is along the way, with stereotypical characters and cliched scenarios.
• Dancing Bear: A lot of promotion for the book centered around it having been written by a 19 year-old Harvard student and starring an Indian-American protagonist (which was rare - if not unheard of - in YA literature at the time). Several early reviews pointed out that, while not terribly-written, there wasn't much else to make it stand out plot-wise. It then quickly became better known for stealing content from other books; it even turned out that some parts were plagiarized from Born Confused, a 2002 novel about an Indian-American girl torn between these two cultures that was also marketed as one of the first YA American novels with a South Asian protagonist.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Kaavya Viswanathan stated she based Opal and parts of the story upon her own experiences. A major plot point in the novel involves Opal eventually being exposed as trying to engineer her high school popularity to get into Harvard, causing her to be publicly humiliated and labelled a fraud. Just weeks after the novel's debut, Viswanathan was publicly exposed and heavily criticized for passing off content from other novels as her own work.
• Mis-blamed: In the years since the plagiarism scandal broke, there's been speculation and debate on whether Kaavya Viswanathan was truly the only person at fault for how the book turned out, or if she got thrown under the bus as the author and thus the most visible person involved. As discussed here and here, Viswanathan was hired to write a young adult novel by book packaging company Alloy, who come up with concepts for books then hire authors to write the stories, while retaining legal ownership of the idea and a degree of creative control; Opal Mehta was no different (author L. J. Smith notoriously got burnt by this in regards to The Vampire Diaries, with Alloy firing her from the series and hiring a ghostwriter when they disagreed with Smith on the plot direction of future books). Apparently, no one at Alloy picked up on any plagiarism or helped Viswanathan with editing before Opal Mehta was shipped off for publishing (by all accounts they don't have much to do with the books they produce once the manuscript is turned in), while at the time Viswanathan was a teenager who had no experience with publishing and had only written a single manuscript unrelated to Opal Mehta (which was rejected by her agent because it was believed it wouldn't sell well). Even Megan McCafferty (one of the authors whose works were plagiarised from) publicly questioned how much culpability was shared with Alloy.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Opal Mehta was the highly-publicized debut novel of Kaavya Viswanathan and the first (or only) thing that comes to people's minds when it's mentioned is the plagiarism controversy; most of its Wikipedia article is dedicated to discussing this and the fall-out, with barely any mention of its plot. Shortly after its publication in April 2006, it drew a storm of controversy after it was found that several sections had been plagiarised from other novels. Consequently, all shelf copies of the book were withdrawn, development on a planned movie adaptation was halted permanently and Viswanathan's contract for a sequel was cancelled.
• So Okay, It's Average: Removed from the plagiarism accusations, some readers have found that the novel is formulaic and silly in places, but is otherwise a fun light read, and that it's a shame both the book and author became embroiled in scandal because the plot on its own merits isn't all that bad.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The year is only mentioned once in the entire book; chapter 28 begins with the phrase "Graduation Day 2006", setting it roughly around the time the book was published. Even without it though, several reviews have noted that the book is clearly rooted in the early-to-mid 2000s, due to the frequent mentioning of shows like The O.C. (ran from 2003 - 2007) and Total Request Live (ran from 1998 - 2008 until the 2017 revival), characters listening to then-popular musicians like 50 Cent and shopping at Blockbuster Video (where they buy DVDs of The O.C., no less), the emphasis on parties, fashion and dating as the epitome of teen life, and more. On a less pleasant note, it's been pointed out that some of the casual remarks and attitudes of the teen cast come off as sexist, racist and/or classist these days (e.g. Opal looks down on immigrants working blue collar jobs and some of her remarks about women come off as misogynistic and Slut-Shaming) but were considered more 'acceptable' or a source of 'edgy' humor in the early 2000s. In a more meta sense, most of the books that Opal Mehta 'borrowed' from were also published in the early-to-mid 2000s, so it contains a lot of tropes, archetypes, humor and so on that were popular in YA literature at that time.

---