The New York Observer has a piece up about Alloy Entertainment, the book packager that was called in to help Kaavya Viswanathan “write” How Opal. . . :

The convoluted authorial structure of Alloy books is anything but transparent.

“To me, all that stuff is such a black box,” said one author who has worked with the company. “They have writers who don’t exist, and they have writers who don’t really write the stuff, and they have one series supposedly by one author that are by many. There’s no one-to-one alignment between anything that gets produced and the producer. There’s no literary accountability.” 

Literary accountability, maybe not. We’ll see about legal accountability. As Booksquare writes in their post about Little, Brown’s decision not to revise Opal:

While we’re not cynical, we fully expect a lawsuit or two to be coming down the pike. ‘Cause this is America and suing is our national right.

(See other posts I’ve written here and here. And here and here.)