Born May 13, 1938, in New York City. "When I was about five, my parents moved from Manhattan to Jamaica, Queens. The neighborhood we lived in was essentially the one in which Cici of Hangin' Out with Cici grew up. The houses had yards, and it was safe...

With over six hundred titles to her credit in a half-dozen different series, Francine Pascal is one of the most successful publishing phenomena ever in juvenile and young adult literature. She made publishing history in 1985 when Perfect Summer, the...

The Crown catalogue describes Francine Pascal's forthcoming adult novel, If Wishes Were Horses. . . (Jan.), as a "wild and passionate" love story about a woman's struggle to find herself after her husband's death, likening the book to "A Year in Provence if...

FRANCINE PASCAL'S FIRST SERIES FOR TEENAGE GIRLS, THE LONG-running Sweet Valley High, follows innocuous twins Elizabeth and Jessica, who spend most of their time fretting about boys. Now teens are hooked on a radically different blond Pascal creation: Gaia, a buff and tough...

I think that's how I remember it anyway. It's been a while. All this to say that the best reporting on the Kaavya story is of course coming from other undergraduates. And at least one of them is on to the real angle. Jon Liu...

The company behind Harvard author Kaavya Viswanathan and her now-cancelled book, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, is a young-adult media giant called Alloy Entertainment, whose unconventional way of doing business has left some authors in the Y.A. world with...