WWW- KAAVYA Viswanathan, the Harvard University sophomore caught Crimson-handed plagiarizing passages from two chick-lit novels by New Jersey author Megan McCafferty, may have had some accomplices.

The Harvard Independent, a weekly student newspaper, raises the specter that New York-based 17th Street Productions, a ghostwriting shop for young adult fiction, helped mold Viswanathan’s hot debut novel, “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life” – for which she scored a half-million dollar, two-book deal at age 17.

The book, which has already drawn interest for a movie adaptation, contains more than 40 passages suspiciously similar to McCafferty’s first two books, “Sloppy Firsts” and “Second Helpings.”

Viswanathan, 19, has admitted being a big fan of McCafferty, and offered a rather unconvincing apology this week by way of saying she “wasn’t aware of how much I may have internalized Ms. McCafferty’s words.”

But the Harvard Independent wonders, “So how much ‘packaging’ did 17th Street do for ‘Opal Mehta?’ Was it, like a ‘Sweet Valley’ novel, brought to life by an anonymous writer for hire on the basis of an outline by Viswanathan?

“Or was Viswanathan more deeply involved? If someone plagiarized Megan McCafferty’s books, was it Viswanathan herself – or was it one of 17th Street’s unnamed freelancers, cracking under the pressure of six-week deadlines and reaching into the work of a successful competitor for a paragraph here and there?”

Neither 17th Street Productions nor Viswanathan’s publisher, Little Brown, returned our calls yesterday.

In a statement issued earlier this week, Steve Ross, McCafferty’s publisher at Crown, said: “We have documented more than 40 passages” from Viswanathan’s book containing “identical language and/or common scene or dialogue structure” from McCafferty’s books – “nothing less than an act of literary identity theft.”

But Viswanathan still won’t admit purposely pilfering McCafferty’s words: “When I was writing, I genuinely believed each word was my own,” she told Katie Couric yesterday on the “Today” show.