Rating: 
Summary: guilty fun!
Review: there's obviously little literary merit in this funny gripe-fest, but it is a guilty pleasure for anyone who has worked in a place where the political hierarchy is running rampant. new doctors doing their residencies, new attorneys dealing with old school partners, first year teachers dealing with possessive parents and any other newly hatched professional will certainly see the truth in Weisberger's observations. take the dust jacket off if you are a self-professed bibliophile and read to your heart's content. if you want griping with a bit more literary flair, turn to _The Nanny Diaries_...regardless, this novel is a charmer.
Rating: 
Summary: Hellishly Boring!
Review: This book is the latest in a genre that spawned such books as 'The Nanny Diaries,' which reads like Shakespeare compared with this book. The Devil Wears Prada could be fun and gossipy, but the protagonist is so unlikeable that it's just impossible to care about or be interested in her character. She wants to be a serious writer, yet she takes a job at a fashion magazine, hates it, whines about it, yet somehow buys into it at the same time--without a hint of irony. She claims to hate the cattiness and the backstabbing, yet behaves just as badly, if not worse (complete with references to 'that wretched Harry Potter series' and a weird jab at her foreign roommates, who look 'exactly alike'). She also claims to feel 'fat' because she's 5'10 and a hefty 115 pounds. Oh please. But lest we think she's entirely shallow, she does find time to sneak away from her desk to distribute Starbucks coffee to the homeless (while chatting to her friends on her cell phone and smoking, of course). I mean, what a multi-dimensional character! Yawn...
The evil Miranda (based on Anna Wintour, supposedly), had the potential to be an interesting villian, but instead of fully developing the character and unearthing what motivates her to behave so horribly, all we get are canned sound bytes in which she yowls demands for special china and boxes of Hermes scarves. The 'civilian' characters in the book, such as the boyfriend and the best friend, come across like last-minute ditch efforts to humanize the main character. Their plotlines are so thin that it's worth skipping their chapters entirely.
The great irony is that the harrowed heroine desperately wants to work at The New Yorker; hopefully the fictional protagonist's writing abilities are superior to Weisberger's cliched prose. Just like the world of fashion, the best part of this book is on the surface--the title is great-- but unfortunately there's nothing much on the inside.
Rating: 
Summary: Engaging & funny
Review: I love books that are based on someone's true life work experiences. Ms. Weisberger has crafted an engaging and funny tale of her time at a popular fashion magazine. Is any/all of it true? Who knows, but it sure made me laugh. I'd like to do the same some day with stories from my own workplace.
I also recommend 'The Nanny Diaries' and 'No One's Even Bleeding'. Both are written in very much in the same vein.
Rating:
Summary: Great Read
Review: I loved reading this book. It was funny and unbeleivable. It reminded me of The Nanny Diaries, only a lot more enjoyable. If this book is only partly true about the woman that Ms. Weisberger used to be an assistant for, she should be embarrased and ashamed. For anyone who is remotely interested in fashion, it will entertain.
Rating:
Summary: WOW -- Harsh Reviews For A Fun Book
Review: OK - so it's not "War and Peace". OK - it's not "Pride and Prejudice". BUT, I personally don't think "The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger was supposed to be. It was meant to be a fun (possibly tongue-in-cheek) portrayal of a young women's entrance into the world of fashion magazine publishing. Andrea Sachs goes to work for Miranda Priestly, the all-powerful editor of Runway magazine. And, Ms. Priestly is in a word. A b*tch. There's no doubt that this is a stab at author Lauren Weisberger's tenure as assistant to well known Vogue editor Anna Wintour and is very familiar to bestseller "The Nanny Diaries" but it's unfair to group them together as the same book. They are differnt and have enough power in themselves to hold their own.I think the previous reviews of "The Devil Wears Prada" were unnecessarily harsh and a bit unfair. I really enjoyed this easy to read and fun to savor bit of New York gossip.
Rating:
Summary: A humorous read about working for a she-devil.
Review: Andrea has recently graduated from Brown, and her goal is to work for 'The New Yorker.' Instead, she winds up starting out as an editorial assistant for Runway, a fashion magazine, in New York City. Andrea assumes that her one year spent there will result in an excellent recommendation to any other magazine of her choice. However, her boss, Miranda, winds up being the boss from hell. She is nasty and thinks that the world revolves around her. Andrea winds up being more of Miranda's 7-day-a-week personal assistant, rather than her weekday editorial assistant. Andrea is forced to keep her cell phone on at all times (including weekends), just in case Miranda needs something. Soon enough, the 7-day-a-week pressure that Miranda puts on Andrea, as well as her personal life, takes its toll. At the end of the story, Andrea is left to choose between the sought-after recommendation or continuing to receive Miranda's abuse. I thought that this was a fun story to read. I agree that it was a little too long and repetitive, but I don't agree with those who said that it was a waste of time and money. The format was similar to last year's, 'The Nanny Diaries.' I recommend this book to those looking for a light, summer read.
Rating:
Summary: Delicious Trash
Review: While it's an entertaining and utterly mindless "beach read", Ms. Weisberger obviously has written an exhaustive autobiography of her fist post-college year. Having myself worked for a horribly demanding and selfish female CEO for many years, it was easy to identify with her frustration, degradation and lack of self-dignity and re-live the first years of my career. The only real humor regarding this book has been watching the fashion industry's reactions to the "INSIDE STORY OF THE REAL ANNA WINTOUR" which unfortunately is all this book amounts to be.
Rating:
Summary: Great subject, but poorly written and uninspired
Review: OK, we get it. Andrea Sachs has the worst boss ever. That's about all you need to know about Lauren Weisberger's novel "The Devil Wears Prada." True, the title is great, and so the subject matter could have been. Instead, though, the book is a seemingly endless litany of all of the insane things fashion editor Miranda Priestly does or demands her peon assistant to do or get for her, and the gag grows old. Undoubtedly, Priestly is pathetic, unable (or just unwilling) to do even the simplest task for herself, while demanding others do the impossible. (It's a thinly veiled secret that Priestly is based on Anna Wintour, the famously icy editor of Vogue, and the fictional Elias-Clark Company is of course Conde Nast.) Weisberger has some fun mocking the Manolo-clad fashion assistants she calls "Clackers," as well as the fabulous, excessive Conde Nast cafeteria. And Miranda's craziness is a scream, but that's where the fun ends. The problem lies with the protagonist herself. She doesn't have to be likeable, but she could at least be interesting. Instead, Andrea Sachs is a whiny, spoiled brat who thinks the world should just fall at her feet. She makes no attempt to hide the fact that she thinks working at a fashion magazine is completely insignificant and beneath her. We may be able to identify with having a hellish job, but the thing is, that doesn't make us sympathize with her. Everyone, unless they come from extreme privilege or just have damn good luck, has had a horrendous first job or a terrible boss, so we don't exactly feel sorry for her when she must deal with Miranda's antics. In fact, Andrea has such a sense of entitlement, such a ridiculous superiority complex, that we almost smile when she must search block after block for an antique store Miranda remembers seeing once. It's as if no one ever had a bad job or a crazy boss until Andrea did, and of course, hers is the worst of the worst. The ironic thing is that just as her boss is completely wrapped up in herself, so too is Andrea. She may not get to order assistants around, but her inability to see beyond her own nose makes her just as insufferable. And her personal life? Wish I could tell you, but I skipped those chapters. They weren't particularly interesting or enlightening. (Yes, we know the housing market in New York is ridiculous. And gee, it's awful, isn't it, when an attractive, wealthy, amazing writer for the New Yorker pursues you?) Besides this, her constant moaning that no one understands just how horrendous her job is and that no one has a job worse than hers wears thin almost immediately. Sachs doesn't even appear to learn anything from her whole ordeal and doesn't seem to be aware of her spoiled behavior, which is perhaps the most obnoxious and annoying thing about the character. Andrea wants to work at the New Yorker, the sterling example of good writing. But if Weisberger's writing is any indication, the New Yorker won't come calling anytime soon. Boring and repetitive by the halfway mark, the novel reads like a first or second draft, not a polished, finished product. The dialogue is stilted and wooden, and the prose is so ungrammatical, I found myself having to reread or just skip passages altogether. Granted, it's not intended to be Tolstoy, but there is an art to comedic writing, as evidenced by Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones books and even, "The Nanny Diaries," whose "expose your boss" style the book emulates. Unfortunately, Weisberger falls short of both, leaving us to wonder what the novel would have been in the hands of a better or more perceptive writer.
Rating:
Summary: surprisingly not well written...
Review: how fast must this book have been pushed through editing? sweet fancy moses. there's an interesting story to be told here, but it's all told so woodenly that i can't imagine anyone getting very excited over it. i'm in publishing, so of course i was curious about the book; but it only takes about 3 hours to read. for this kind of "inside scoop," the nanny diaries was really much better. it didn't make sense that the heroine was supposed to be so "fashion clueless" and yet was able to name-drop (Bungalow 8, Nobu) right from the get-go. how did she get this job again? for pete's sake, even i know how to pronouce Givenchy, and i'm from Cleveland. the non-"Runway" stuff was so incidental to the story that i mostly skimmed over it. i think this book would be fine on the plane or the beach, but otherwise...not memorable.
Rating: 
Summary: Totally worth skipping!!
Review: I wasted my precious dollars on this trashy book. The title was what fooled me, I thought it would be a smartly written book. The plot is childish and the language is not at all interesting. What was Lauren thinking -- would such mediocrity really sell??
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