Rating: 
Summary: What's all the fuss about?
Review: After hearing about this book for ages, I decided to give it a try. Really, what is everyone all gung ho about? The character is unlikeable, although she obviously thinks that she's got the brains of a rocket scientist the way she looks down on everything and everyone around her at her job. Her relationship with her boyfriend is just plain old boring. The boss is a walking stereotype. I would have given this one star, but because I couldn't even make it through the entire book before I got bored and sick of the nauseating characters, I figured that wouldn't be honest because I don't know if the entire thing is bad - but most certainly the first half that I read wasn't worth all the press.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Characters and Fascinating Situations
Review: Andrea gets a dream job at a fashion magazine, but gets the boss-from-hell. Actually her dream involved writing for the New Yorker but fetching coffee and dry cleaning for the boss seems unlikely to train her for that. She plugs away as the job becomes all consuming and the demands from her boss grate more and more on her nerves.
As her relationships dwindle under the stress of the job, the conflict with the boss becomes more personalized. Andrea becomes more and more paranoid as sleep deprivation and lack of social support turn her into a whining, unpleasant person herself.
Fascinating insider view of the fashion industry and working in the high-pressure NYC jobs. Often funny, a bit romantic and eventually somewhat depressing as Andrea is dragged further and further down by the job and the horror that is her boss.
Rating:
Summary: A predictable 'Chick Lit' story for 8th Graders.
Review: As we all could guess, the esteem a book holds to a given individual has at least something to do with how the circumstances of a story relate to the circumstances of your life.
So let me say: I am a Gen-Xer, a man, and having spent some 23 years in schooling of one kind or another, look for the deeper meaning of the stuff I read. Thus my title for the review... ah yes now it makes sense.
I suppose if you've never been to NYC (as many 8th graders have not) the descriptions of downtown are cool. And I suppose the way materialistic megalomaniacs treat their subbordinates may intrigue a junior high-schooler, yet unaccustomed to the ways of the world. I suppose Vogue holds some appeal for women of all ages, thank God; yes we all admire beautifull women. They are fun to look at, but, often, not to analyse, which this book seemingly attempts to do. Trouble with such subject matter: not much there to delve into.
I knew there was trouble, when, during the first few pages, the main character started listing the prices of the various garments she was wearing. Ridiculous amounts of money of course per item. Who would care how much a Gucci handbag costs? Those of us who don't know don't care. And those of us who do know don't need reminding. Thus, the author is writing for the sake of seeing words on the page: there is no deeper meaning to what whe describes. Expensive clothes, mean bosses, snobby women. These are depicted without analysis, but worse yet, with no tidbits for the reader to form any sort of analysis for himself.
I know what you are thinking: this guy is not smart enough to figure out the deeper meaing of the story, and so he gripes...
Well, be my guest and use a few hours of your time reading that book, so you too agree with this essay.
Now, let's go through the books we've read and think about one with perhaps more substance... and style. A story about young people, young men and young women, who face the moral ambiguities of the day, juggling their 'careers' so to speak, dealing with love and relationships, and where the ending is not as happy as or as concise as one might like. I tell you what comes to mind: Corelli's Mandolin, which interestingly takes up less room on the bookshelf. Now that my young Chick-lits, is something worth reading!
But, as usual, not if you've seen the movie already, which will, if you have seen it, spoil for you one of the finest books around, and will leaving you cursing Hollywood, and henceforth watching IFC.
Rating: 
Summary: Utterly Boring, with designer name-dropping.
Review: I had high hopes for this novel. Picking it up and reading the back of the book, I thought it would be a gossipy, exciting, Sex-and-the-City-esque look into working in the world of fashion and life in New York City. Instead, it turned out to be terribly written, with utterly unbelievable characters and an increasingly dull plotline.
First off, Andrea, the main character, is not someone that I found likeable at all. She seemed completely contrived. Considering her goody-two-shoes narration I had trouble believing that she smoked or even went out partying in college as she said she did. I especially had trouble believing that she even got the job to work at the glamorous fashion magazine, Runway. Andrea's emotional dilemma vascillated between two things, "I don't fit in here and I hate my boss." "I have to sacrifice everything even though I'm a whiny, annoying little OOH SO HUGE SIZE SIX!!! girl and do everything for my boss because I want to work at the New Yorker. Because I'm such a great writer, you know." If I were to take the evidence of Weisberger's prose as "Andrea's writing," I'd say, "Working at the New Yorker? MAYBE IN AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE!!"
I don't think anyone who read this book could actually believe that someone would put up with such a terrible job and a terrible boss, that they complained about incessantly, which apparently drove them to the breaking point. Obviously, Andrea liked wearing designer clothes. Or did she? Or was the job just changing her? Frankly, who cares? I couldn't care. I couldn't believe or like the main character at all. She was boring and moronic, and even contemplated staying with her job in another country while her supposed "best friend" was in a coma. Yikes. Unlike Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City, who I loved even as she had an affair with her married ex-boyfriend, I simply hated Andrea for even existing on the printed page.
The other characters were not much better. Andrea's boss, Miranda Priestly, certainly asked for absurd things. Any other person with a spine would have told the woman to go screw herself after at least the first few outrageous demands, no matter how bright the light at the end of the tunnel. Strong women, they do not put up with that kind of thing. Strong women find other ways to make it to the top. Personally, I couldn't really believe Miranda was that evil because Andrea simply kept putting up with her. Even when Andrea finally told Miranda off and quit at the end of the book, I really didn't believe that Andrea was taking much of a stand. She had been walked all over the entire length of the novel. And Weisberger insisted that she always had to say, "Ahn-dre-ah!!" which got really, really annoying.
Lily, Emily, Alex, and Christian - all boring supporting roles in the novel. Her relationship with Alex, her boyfriend, was as moronic as you can get, and consisted of her abusing and neglecting him for the better part of a year. Emily was unbelievable as she couldn't decided whether or not to be snarky or nice. Lily was the pathetic drunk friend, and Andrea was stupid enough to not say anything about the drinking until she got herself knocked into a coma, which, miraculously, she came out of as soon and Andrea came to see her - like that ever happens in real life. Christian was the hot, tempting, stylish boy, and only further demonstrated what a shallow, lifeless character Andrea was, because she was actually interested in him.
The dialogue was completely unbelievable and contrived, a la Dawson's Creek. If you don't believe me, try acting out some of the scenes with a friend. You will cringe in your skin. People don't talk like that. The happy, hopeful storybook ironic ending was just annoying. While I'm not in anyway proclaiming to be a fantastic writer, I just have to say that I absolutely abhorred Weisberger's writing. This stuff might fly in a high school creative writing class, but I can't believe she actually got published. I think that the terrible writing is at the absolute center of why this book is so horrid. It could have been an interesting book. But with such a terrible writer, such contrived and boring characters, and such a dull, lackluster plotline completely lacking in rising action/climax... the book crashed before it even saw the runway.
The fashion name-dropping even got annoying after a while. I think Weisberger should have written a story about the ready-to-wear fashions of Spring 2001 or whatever instead of horrifying millions with this monstrosity of a novel.
In short - leave your credit cards and library cards in your Chanel wallet, don't take one step on your Manolos or Jimmy Choos to go out and buy this book. You will regret having spent hours of your life reading it.
I can't believe I read the whole thing!
Rating:
Summary: Sweetie, Move Back to Connecticut
Review: I picked this book up at the airport two days ago and read it obsessively until it was finished. It was like eating MacDonalds or watching a marathon session of The Real World. You know it's bad, you know it's not enriching, but you can't help yourself. Because it's so bad, it's kind of fantastic.
This is a thinly veiled account of the author's 1 year tenure working as Anna Wintour's assistant at Vogue. The book lacks the narrative structure of fiction because it ISN'T fiction. It's a memoir with made up names. As in life, characters come and go unnannounced and are introduced to us for no apparent reason. Chance events happen that don't really add much to the major themes that this book explores - working for a maniac, being young and ambitious in Manhattan, and growing up.
The author's writing has been vilified, and that seems pretty fair. Half that attack should be leveraged on her editor, however. This is a book about the fashion industry, and noone checked the correct spelling of the makeup artist Bobbi Brown's name? On the plus side, I think the author did a great job capturing what it feels like to be out of college, in your first apartment in a big city. It created nostalgic feelings for this reader.
The main problem is the narrator is herself quite unlikeable. Yes, Anna (Miranda) is evil and psychotic. Surprise. The narrator isn't much better. One can't help agree with her coworker Emily that she is sarcastic and condescending. And a major bigot. The book is full of appallingly snide references to JAPS (!), meek Indian roomates who are indistinguishable from each other and smell like curry(I'm not kidding), and homeless people who are "filthy and smelly" (and whom the author, fancying herself a real humanitarian, supplies free coffees to, which she pays for by stealing from her company). She also doles out judgment to homosexuals (admonishing one bad gay for having sex since we live in tha "Age of Aids"), people with tattoos and piercings, and immigrants. What this girl is doing in New York City at all, I have NO idea.
Rating:
Summary: waste of time
Review: I was excited to see that this book had finally been released on paperback so I picked it up immediately. However, it was very disappointing. The book is a 400-page rant from a selfish, boring character that we've seen millions of times before (think blonde, blue eyed, naive, small-town girl..) The author writes as though she is an expert in her field dishing the dirt - meanwhile the info in this book is common knowledge and there are even some things I find incorrect. Also, it is not particularly well-written or articulate. The author tends to go into such detail about daily trips to Starbucks but briefly mulls over entire months of the protagonist's life. It may be a cute read for younger women or those who are really curious about the fashion industry.
Rating:
Summary: Two and a Half Stars
Review: In reading over the reviews posted here, it seems that people are very bothered by the shallow, materialistic protagonist. I didn't necessarily get that impression and besides, if every character was likeable and exuding righteousness, we'd never have had some of the great litery heroes and heroines. That being said, Andrea Sachs doesn't fall into that category and the book itself was largely a disappointment. I had no expectation of lofty intellectual reading, but some semblance of plot would have been nice. Every aspect of the story was completely predictable and the characters were rather poorly developed. I wouldn't go as far as to say that this was a waste of money, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone either.
Rating:
Summary: Don't waste your time
Review: It is terrible. She does not know how to write.
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: entertaining but lacking substance
Review: The book kept me reading, which is a good thing. I'm not a person who reads alot. It was a nice book for the time being, but I don't think I'd read it again. Once I finished the book I was left thinking, "Is that it?". I guess it's all in what you're looking for. If you want a book that is entertaining and fun to read then this is a good book. If you're looking for a book that you'll want to read over and over again, one that builds suspense and provokes feelings, then this is not a good book for you.
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