A cluster of clones hits high school in author’s first novel,‘ The Similars’

It hadn’t even occurred to Rebecca Hanover to write a novel. But one day, she was on the phone with her mom in Tennessee, talking about the day-today stuff; what the family was up to and was she eating enough fiber. “And then out of nowhere, my mom says ‘What if clones came to high school?’” Hanover said, laughing.

It was an idea that stuck. It took a few years, but “The Similars” (Sourcebooks, $17.99, 400 pages) came out this year with the tagline “Six clones. One elite boarding school. Countless deadly secrets.”

It’s the San Francisco author’s first novel but by no means her first foray into writing. She left her hometown near Memphis for Stanford, where she majored in English and drama. For her senior thesis, she performed a onewoman show she wrote.

“Afterward people said, ‘Yeah, the performance was good, but oh my gosh, the writing was so funny!’ It was the first time I saw people react to my writing,” she recalled.

After graduating, Hanover headed to Manhattan to see what she could do with her degrees.

“I arrived a week before 9/11,” she said. “I was 22, had no job, and after 9/11, I was afraid to fly.”

Hanover found a haven in bookstores and gobbled up the four Harry Potter books that had been written at the time.

“It was a formative time for me,” she said. “I became obsessed with Harry Potter. The books sparked something in me; I just wandered through bookstores, wondering if maybe I could write kids’ books someday.”

But first, Hanover figured out how to combine her college majors. She got an internship for the “Guiding Light” soap opera, eventually working her way up to the writer’s desk and winning a Daytime Emmy.

“It was a dream job on so many levels,” she said. “Everything I learned about storytelling, I learned there. It was like writing bootcamp. It all happened so fast.”

It helped her with re-