Rating: 
Summary: Enjoyable, keeps you turning pages long after midnight
Review: The sheer fact that so many readers have rated this book with only one star, proves the author's point and skill.
Contrary to what has been written here, I feel that the style and language are appropriate to get the shallow, extreme world of fashion publishing across. The narrative pulls you in and you keep on reading every word, and laughing out loud many times, which in my opinion is one of the definitions of a good book. However, whether the author is/was skilled and/or experienced enough to fulfill her lifelong dream to write for the New Yorker has little to do with the quality of the writing in this book. Different messages require different media, which require different writing styles. Even if the author has taken the creative liberty to exaggerate the events and behaviour of Miranda (her boss from hell), the real message comes through loud and clear. The book describes a depressing place to work in, yet you keep laughing and wanting to know what happens next. Andrea, or Laura, might have been "the staffer from hell", as one of her former colleagues writes, she might not have had any PA skills to speak of and her attitude to feel "above it all" is probably true and terribly annoying, it is the bosses like "Miranda" whose behaviour are hellish. It is when the top of such corporations allow it and suffer silently with the rest of the staff, that they become the Enforcers, the guilty ones, helping the Miranda's of this world to keep on behaving like this. No person in this world can rightly claim the right to terrorise others. No matter what worldly position you hold, no matter if you've been born with a golden spoon in your mouth or as a pauper, you simply don't behave like this. It doesn't really matter if Miranda Priestly is Anna Wintour's alter ego. Only staffers can tell and they won't, as Laura does describe so well, they've been brainwashed and have lost the power to objectively look at their lives. Or maybe the many fringe benefits are compensation enough to accept the daily terror. Laura, as Andrea, isn't really trying to portray herself as a Saint. She's admits to many of faults and incompetences, some of which would not have been tolerated in other companies and would have had her fired much earlier. In that respect I can understand someone like "Emily" whose main complaint about Andrea is her attitude. In the end, Andrea decides that her ambitions are just not worth it when reality in the form of a friend in need, snaps her out of it. Bosses like "Miranda" exist. Be grateful that you've never encountered such person. But then, you've lost a chance to write a book about it. In the meantime you spend a few hours laughing out loud and being thankful that when your phone rings at 2 am in the morning, it's a "wrong number" and not somebody barking to find her a seat on a flight right now...
Rating: 
Summary: Fun read but not a great book
Review: I liked this book and found it fast and enjoyable to read. But at the end of the day it doesn't really add up to a lot. Andrea Sachs, an aspiring magazine writer, lands a job as personal assistant to Miranda Priestly, the high profile editor of "Runway" magazine. Andrea quickly finds that the job involves numerous mundane and tedious chores, long hours, incessant demands and enormous personal sacrifices. The fact that author Lauren Weisberger wrote this book after working as Personal Assistant to Anna Wintour from Vogue adds a lot of credibility to the environment and story. One of the flaws with this book is that the job really does sound like it would be glamorous and (at least sometimes) fun. Although Miranda does come across as being the Boss From Hell, you still feel that Andrea is just a whinging and ungrateful employee, who performs her job with little grace. I'm a stay at home Mom, and all I can say is that if it's too much to deal with someone who refuses to eat the food you've bought for them, changes their mind irrationally and makes petulant demands of you, then Lauren Weisberger should never have children! At least Andrea got to dress in designer clothes, attend Parisian fashion shows and go home at the end of the day. The other problem with this book is that you never really care about Andrea. In the end she has to make a decision between a job that she hates and a boyfriend and best friend whom I had come to dislike intensely. It wasn't a dilemma that invoked much sympathy from me. I did enjoy reading this book, but I suspect that I'll have forgotten it by tomorrow.
Rating: 
Summary: Well *I* liked it!!!
Review: I *LOVED* this book, regardless of what anyone else says. I mean, the people that wrote bad reviews of this book must never have had a tough job with a demanding boss in their life. As in this book, I am not allowed to get up from my desk for any kind of break, restroom or not, unless I have someone else to sit there and answer it - So it's not all that far-fetched. I have to get my boss's coffee and lunch, make his appointments, etc., just like Andrea. However, I work in a law firm, which is not as exciting and fashionably-fabulous as a fashion magazine. BUT, my boss is not horrible, mean, rude, and evil. I actually love my boss. Andrea's boss, Miranda, was a horrid, evil devil-woman. I totally agreed with Andrea in this book, 100%. I've been treated like poo by people above me before, and no one deserves that. Just because you are low on the totem pole doesn't mean you're doggie doo. So, I was shouting for Andrea the whole book. I loved it and just thought it was all around fabulous. And if you honestly think that any employee deserves to be treated like Andrea was, then you have a real, REAL problem.
Rating: 
Summary: Quit yer whining, Andrea, and grow up!
Review: As this book is clearly autobiographical, I think this book would have been much improved if the writer waited several years after her stint as an assistant concluded and then penned the book. Then, at least, the writer would have "gotten over" her need to avenge her boss and focused more on revealing the juicy aspects of the fashion world. The inside scoop on the world of fashion journalism was the only interesting part of the book and unfortunately, it took a minivan-size backseat to the author's incessant whining about her boss! The author is obviously young and naive because anyone who has been working for awhile has had to eat dirt for difficult people at one time or another -- however, it does not necessarily make interesting subject matter. The main character, Andrea, is unsympathetic because she has this sense of entitlement so that, despite being only a recent college grad with no skills or work experience (except at an ice cream parlor), she expresses on every other page how wronged she is because she is not obtaining solid writing experience at the magazine even though that fact was openly disclosed to her before she accepted the job as an assistant. Her attitude is bad, as her boss points out correctly, and you begin to feel more sorry for the boss for having an assistant who takes cigarette breaks when she should be working. Further, to its detriment, the book is filled with Andrea's (i.e., the author's) numerous unfair judgments of her co-workers and her boss (who cares if her boss wants two sugars with her lattes?). If she was a better writer she would have simply relayed her experiences at the magazine and let the reader go along for the ride -- instead I feel like I'm back in high school and the author is trying to force me to "take sides" in a fight she's having with her friend. Moreover, the unredeemable writing doesn't it make it any easier to get through either. (By the way, did anyone else think the boyfriend, Alex, was a jerk?)
Rating:
Summary: I would have given this 3 1/2 stars
Review: I enjoyed the book, some parts were really funny, like when Eduardo made Andrea sing and dance to enter the bldg!
All in all a very enjoyable read, bordering on fluff, but still with a very good ending!
Rating:
Summary: save your $20
Review: this is a truly awful book. boo frickety hoo this undeserving college grad's boss will not allow her spend all day on the phone to her friends. why the hype? it seems entirely unclear having actually picked up the book to read this second rate attempt at "fictional" writing. by the saccharine sweet end i wanted to get andrea sachs her much desired job at the new yorker just to watch her squirm in misery as she was dismissed due to her total lack of literary talent.
Rating:
Summary: A Disappointment
Review: I can't understand the hype around this book, nor can I really understand how it ever got published. The writing is simple and uninteresting, the plot is almost nil, and it's completely self-indulgent. I had much more sympathy for the mean boss Miranda Priestly. At least she was competent. There is no depth, no major style - the author uses big names to impress the reader rather than detailed, well-written descriptions of the clothes, parties, etc... A waste of money. I skimmed the last 50 pages to the predictable ending just so that I wouldn't feel like I threw $20 in the garbage.
Rating:
Summary: Makes an Interesting Topic Dull
Review: You'd think a novel about a young woman working in the fashion industry would at least be glamorous, but after the first chapter it quickly became boring and whiney. The prose was leaden! Whoever told this woman she could write? Although it's obviously thinly-veiled autobiography and the narrator wants to be a writer, this book was full of such scintillating sentences as "You're scared of me," he stated factually, flashing me a teasing smile. More Danielle Steele than Helen Fielding. But worse than that, there's almost no forward motion to this story. Once it's been established that she hates fashion and despises her shallow editor, what are we waiting for? I felt ahead of the story, uninterested in the main character and almost sympathetic to the boss from Hell. No particular character growth, no surprises, no startling sentences and no laughs. Yes, it sounded like a grueling job, but her reasons for staying were never convincing... other characters in the book are just as shallowly portrayed. She has a flirtation that leads nowhere, an impossibly saintly boyfriend, and a troubled roommate, all of whom seem to be right out of central casting from a Judith Krantz tv movie. I loved Bridget Jones and I read magazines and should have loved a story about a young Jewish girl who wants to write who falls into this job, but her attitude and self-involvement was a turn off. It took me a whole week to finish this and I wouldn't have bothered if I hadn't been asked to read it as a reader's corner reader for Elle. A trip to Paris began to make the book more interesting-- but then it, and the book, abruptly ended. Read THE NANNY DIARIES, HIGH MAINTENANCE or THE LOVELY BONES instead!
Rating:
Summary: The Staffer From Hell
Review: Snot-nose Lauren Weisberger (alias Andrea) doesn't go as far as to say she actually spat in the coffees she was fetching for Anna Wintour (alias Miranda Priestley), but she does admit to trying to squeeze the stuff she was actually paid to do around her personal calls, personal e-mails and cigarette breaks. And you can't help feeling that the spitting happened only Weisberger doesn't want to own up to such appalling behaviour while she's trying to paint her employer as the devil incarnate to her 'cutie-pie, caring-sharing' alter-ego. Every task is too demeaning for Andrea. We never really find out what fabulous qualities she has which allow her to consider all work beneath her, apart from an extraordinarily high self-regard. Washing dishes was a no no, even if it was just one plate, but faking expenses (lots of them, every day) was OK by her. Revenge on the company that expected her to actually work for her pay is the name of the game. In an attempt to gain our sympathy Weisberger explains just how tough it was to get up every day at 5:30 in order to get in at 7:00. But that sob story soon palls when she reveals that her commute was a whole 10 minutes (thanks to a company sponsered taxi ride, which she regularly rorted). So why the 5:30 alarm? Because it was half an hour before she was actually out of bed and an hour was needed to try on and reject outfits. Organizational skills are obviously not Ms. Weisberger's strong point, which may explain why she wasn't the most appreciated employee chez Vogue (alias Runway). The main character of this novel is so unsympathetic that the whole premise of the book is undermined. It's not the boss from hell that grabs your attention as you make your way through this long whine, it is the staffer from hell. A warning to all employers. If the girl's got an attitude problem: ditch her. And skip the book.
Rating:
Summary: the 'protagonist' is totally unsympathetic
Review: are we really supposed to care about Andrea? Sure her boss is horrible, but that's not an excuse to have no redeeming qualities. Andrea dislikes all Southerners (I guess anyone outside New England area is a redneck per this author), she behaves coldly toward her family, and mistreats her boyfriend. I almost take enjoyment of the abuse Andrea suffers under Miranda. If this author wants us to be enthralled with this story, she should have made her main character more likeable. This just isn't well written.
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