I do believe that the books went through the database built during the Nora Roberts/Suerreya case, but can't be commented on yet.
Just curious why you believe this is the case? That's one thing I'm wondering. Is there proof this actually happened?
It's not just objects - it's story beats as well. I haven't read either books, but looking at the exhibits, it looks as if there're just too many coincidences for Chase to have come up with on her own. I personally think Chase used Dumond's story as source material and then tried to make it her own.
Do you mean these story beats?
While I don't typically read a lot of Cinderella romance stories, I'm willing to bet that these beats are included in 90% of them. What it leaves OUT is the wild differences, that when I read it left me with the question, "Why in the world would anyone go to all the trouble to plagiarize a book if all they're taking are the smallest, most incongruous pieces?" So small, I'd consider them crumbs that would add no real value to the story.
Chase's book is a straight-up Cinderella story: Poor waitress whose family's cafe/pie shop is on the verge of foreclosure meets the prince who whisks her off to a fantasy land of rich stuff and snobby people (but not until after they've spent a few weeks dating in NYC first). Dumond's story is a "princess switch" story. She doesn't get whisked away by the prince, she gets hired to impersonate his brother's potential fiancée. They have relatively few actual scenes together and she doesn't even know the hero is a prince until more than halfway through the book (and that prince is also not the heir to the throne like he is in Chase's - so what if they're both named "Nick"?)
Dumond's book also only mentions "pie" in a few incidental places, while the Chase book features an actual pie shop, a heroine who bakes pies, and a crisis point at the end of the book that centers on the fate of said pie shop... the pies in that book are not incidental, while they are in Dumond's. Also, I just ate pie and if I were writing a scene with food in it today I might include pie just because pie is awesome, but that doesn't make me a plagiarist. I also have a character nicknamed "Mad Dog" in one of my books, and there's a bar called "Mad Dog's" in Dumond's book, but that also doesn't make me a plagiarist.
I was *maybe* on the fence and willing to entertain the possibility that she had something until I saw the claim that the heroine being named after Lucille Ball in Dumond's vs. the appearance of an old lady named Mrs. McGillicuddy in Chase's is anything close to plagiarism. (Mrs. McGillicuddy was evidently the name of Lucy's mother in "I Love Lucy"). Or that the similarity between "Christoph" in Dumond's (a key secondary character) and "Christopher" in Chase's (a forgettable, completely incidental side character) is further evidence of plagiarism.
I think she's arguing that the text spinning accounts for them not being identical, but considering all the other varied details where the books are vastly different, I find it really hard to believe an author who is willing to take the time to write a book with the level of character development and depth as Chase's, would then sit down and text-spin incidental details (from a much more superficial book, at that) to pepper through the book. Both books were entertaining reads, but to me it was more like eating a snickerdoodle vs. a chocolate chip cookie. Both share some common ingredients, both are cookies, but no one would claim the chocolate chip cookie was a ripoff of the snickerdoodle. (FWIW, the chocolate chip cookie represents the sexier book, because chocolate.)
I'm super curious how this will go. Because at what point does it really constitute a copyright violation? At what point *should* an author be upset about it?
(For the record, these are the first books I have read by either author. I was just super curious about it because I wanted to see if it was plausible for this "text spinning" to really be a thing and whether or not I could tell if it was happening. I also find it fascinating how many people hop on the witch-hunt bandwagon without knowing all the details, so before I chose sides in conversations with other authors I wanted to see for myself.)
