Just who, and what, is gossip girl? The book gossip girl is Cecily von Ziegesar's debut novel; a racy story involving a group of urban teenagers with a lot of money to burn. The setting: an elite NYC private school filled with kids born to every advantage: wealth, status, looks. They feel entitled, they're sophisticated, they're cosmopolitan, they're worldly. And they deal with the same problems kids deal with everywhere: friends, parents, drugs, sex, college, eating disorders, etc. The narrator: the anonymous gossip girl, who talks about them all online, using only first initials to identify her subjects. And all her readers who are her subjects keep on coming back for more. If Carrie Bradshaw from "Sex in the City" had a little sister, she would be gossip girl. Everyone who's anyone is talking about gossip girl.