The Devil Wears Prada

Do you know that feeling when you're turning in an essay and you've written all the points you wants to hit but was still a few hundred words short so you fill your essay with a bunch of filler? This book read like that. I loved the movie and was so excited to read the book but I had to trudge through the title because of how boring, repetitive, borderline offensive, and extremely unlikable the main protagonist was. The movie was a much more entertaining and endearing story.

The main character, Andrea, was just as entitled as the antagonist, Miranda, was. At some point in the book they challenged this only to be dismissed and prove it right! The main character whines throughout the whole book about her job but doesn't acknowledge she's show more miserable because she constantly cuts corners and makes excuses for her shortcoming. She's an awful employee, friend, and girlfriend throughout the whole novel and never once learns anything through her experiences. The most infuriating part was that she got rewarded for it.

If you want to read chapter after chapter about a girl complaining about the high demand job she signed up to do be my guest. If you want to read a book that actively tells you in great detail how to develop an eating disorder while taking pages from the story to convince you a US size 8 is fat be my guest. If you want to read a story where the main character tells you that her Indian roommates are indistinguishable and caused her clothes to reek of curry but simultaneously says they're never home be my guest. If you want to read over a dozen pages displaying stereotype after stereotype about gay men be my guest. This title wasn't for me and I'm so sad I hated it so much. show less

Andy Sachs just graduated from Brown and her dream job is to write for The New Yorker. What she lands instead is an assistant position for Miranda Priestly, editor of Runway magazine. The job is total hell - Andy is at Miranda's beck and call 14 hours a day for urgent queries such as "Find me that restaurant review I read yesterday" or "Get copies of the newest Harry Potter book for my two daughters the day before they're released". But Andy is assured that if she can make it through a year, Miranda will pull strings and get her any job she wants in magazines. Andy's determined to take this short cut to her dream job, but just how much will she be willing to sacrifice to make it happen?

Of course, the book's a lot more detailed than the show more movie. I was frustrated for parts of it because I just couldn't believe that anyone would stay in such a horrible job, but Weisberger actually managed to convince me that it might be plausible. I found the plot to be interesting (if somewhat predictable) and I was appalled anew each time Miranda Priestly would raise the bar on being the boss from hell. Light, but not stupid, this makes a great summer read. show less

You know, I’d watched this movie in cinemas when it had come out; I was in middle school or very early high school, maybe. I remember enjoying it, but I don’t remember much of it, really. Then I decided to buy the book. I read it recently.
It was…not enjoyable.
The Devil Wears Prada is about Andrea, a newly-graduated college student who is looking for a job. She wants to be a journalist for a big newspaper like The New York Times one day, but she knows that she has a lot of work to do before she can become that good. So she starts to shop around for opportunities, and surely enough a fashion magazine called Runway gives her a chance. A job that a million girls would die for. But not Andrea, apparently. She hates fashion, and she show more is definitely a fish out of water at this new job. But she also knows that one year of working at Runway will get her a job anywhere she wants, and all she has to do is stick it out.
The biggest problem, though, isn’t her aversion to fashion or the fact that her colleagues don’t seem to like her very much. Oh no, her biggest problem is her boss, who is a Class A Bitch.
I read recently somewhere that apparently Laure Weisberger based this on her own personal experience of when she worked as a personal assistant for Anna Wintour, who is known for being just as bad a boss as Miranda Priestly is portrayed as. Knowing this, I found it kinda funny that Anna Wintour makes a brief cameo in the novel during a fashion week in Paris.
Anyway.
It wasn’t the story that bothered me, because the story would be pretty good. It was Andrea. I hated her.
Why is Andrea so unlikeable the entire novel? I can’t like her at all. She’s just so mean spirited and constantly complaining and oh my god, she is so racist. Reading this novel now, in 2019, is a terrible experience because the way she talks about immigrants living in New York is really demeaning. She’s constantly complaining about the people around her that don’t speak English properly because they’re not American; she has a moment where she says that she can’t tell her two Indian roommates apart and that their apartment always smells like curry. She even writes the speech of immigrants in a way that was pretty obvious that she was making fun of their speech patterns. For God’s sake, there’s even a scene where she makes fun of her boss’s British accent and how she can’t understand it.
Seriously. It just reeks of uneducated American, even though she brags in the beginning of the book that she’s travelled so much and been all over the world and she’s really cultured. But, really, she’s just a stuck up brat.
The only redeeming part of this novel was the very last page because that was at least satisfying to read. Everything else was just unbearable because Andrea is just so unlikeable.
Final rating? 2/5. Honestly, some people may like this book but I just can’t get behind it at all. show less

When I looked over at Monsieur Renaud I thought I detected a slight eye-roll and even though I'd always found him oppressively proper over the phone, I reconsidered. Although he was much too professional to show it, never mind actually say anything, I considered that he might loathe Miranda as much as I did. Not because of any real proof I had, but simply because it was impossible to imagine anyone not hating her.

Andrea is not a likeable protagonist. She may have thought that Miranda was self-centred in the extreme, but then so was she. She despised everyone at Runway and made no effort to hide her feelings, while using them to get her foot on the career ladder, as well as taking her boyfriend for granted, not noticing that her best show more friend was sinking into alcoholism, and being so dismissive of her flatmates that it seems as though she could barely distinguish between them.

They definitely softened Andrea's character for the film. show less

Well, that was a waste of time. I LOVE the film. It's one of my favourites and I've seen it dozens of times. The book, however, was not even remotely impressive. The dialogue was just so...flat. I felt no emotion in any of the characters and none of them really felt individual to me. I couldn't bring myself to care about any of them and their interactions seemed so stiff and forced. Most of the book is taken up with references to fashion labels, so much so that it was like reading one big giant advertisement. I am quite disappointed but I guess it's just a rare case of the movie actually being better than the book.

I can see why there’s been rave reviews about The Devil Wears Prada; this is undoubtedly one of the best books I have read in months. An excellently written semi-autobiographical novel about the author’s time working as an assistant at Vogue, Lauren Weisberger taps into the rarely seen, less glamorous side of working for a magazine: the tirelessly long hours, minimal credit and inability to sign off after a day’s work. And that’s even before she’d made it on the editorial rota.

The narrator, Andrea, is an aspiring writer looking to one day work for the New York Times. In her conquest for success, she finds herself hired as the assistant to Miranda Priestley, the editor-in-chief of Runway magazine. At 23 years old, she is show more constantly reminded that her job is one that most girls would dream of having. However, as the novel follows her over the course of her year working for Priestley, she starts to realise that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

Weisberger paints a captivating narrator in the character of Andrea, and the characters she is surrounded by: the alcoholic best friend Lily, bitchy senior assistant Emily and of course the intimidating boss Miranda, to name a few, are all depicted brilliantly. This is a must for anybody who’s ever worked in editorial, or indeed, had a monster of a boss. The Devil Wears Prada is an excellent, gripping, and at times, incredibly humorous, read. show less

Yes the technology aspect of Devil Wears Prada is dated, oh how Andrea would love google docs and real smart phone but the rest of it still stands up to today's chick lit especially having read lots of the "magazine girl" chick lit that followed this one.