After being silenced by the screenwriters strike, gossip soon will fly once more, when new episodes of Gossip Girl begin to air again starting April 21. And fans eager for the next book need wait only until May, when Little Brown Books for Young Readers’ Poppy imprint will publish Cecily von Ziegesar’s Gossip Girl: The Carlyles with a 200,000-copy first printing.


With the exception of the gossipy blogger who gives the series its name, the cast of this and subsequent volumes in the spin-off is all-new, though the setting remains the same. Exactly the same. The Carlyles—teen triplets who relocate to Manhattan from Nantucket—move into the very Fifth Avenue penthouse that Gossip Girl star Blair Waldorf’s family has vacated. They attend the same exclusive private schools as did the characters from the original arc and move in the same privileged social circles.

“My publisher and I wanted to continue Gossip Girl, but the last novel took the characters to the end of the summer after senior year and they were all going off to different parts of the country,” von Ziegesar says. “With all of them scattered, I thought it was more logical to follow a new group of characters, newcomers to the city who land in the same Upper East Side playground.”

Gossip Girl creator Cecily von Ziegesar. Photo: Roger Hagadone.

It is a familiar venue for the author, who grew up in New York City and attended a school much like the novels’ fictional Constance Billard School for Girls. “There is a little bit of me in the characters, but the books are definitely fiction,” explains von Ziegesar. “My life was nowhere as glamorous or exciting as the lives of these characters, though I did have some incredibly wealthy friends. They may have gone to fabulous benefits, but on a daily basis they were going to school, wearing uniforms and doing homework, just like I was. To make the novels more exciting, I elaborated and added elements that made things more current than when I was in high school in the late 1980s.”

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