Bleah. Did not like this one. It’s pretty much the same book as David Bledin’s Bank, but with fashion instead of investment banking and women in place of the men. (Yes, I know Weisberger’s book came first.) Demanding bosses. Menial work. What I like least is that the main character in this book, Andrea Sachs, just buys into all of it and lets people walk all over her. It’s one thing to grudgingly put in your time. It’s quite another to act as if she has no choice. Through most of the story, Sachs is a victim. I do not like victims who willingly stay victims.
I did not feel the payoff was worth it, when at the end she finally decides not to be a victim. There’s no realization that it was her choice before she snaps. She doesn’t get better. Her boss, Miranda Priestly, the editor of a glamorous fashion magazine, just gets so beastly anyone wouldn’t take it. Andrea’s realization that it is better to be fired for telling her boss off than for getting the number of sugars wrong comes after she’s snapped and been fired. The problem I have with that is that even at this point, she is a victim. She did not choose. At no point in this story does Andrea Sachs mentally participate in her own life. She is a leaf on the current. Even to the very end, months after her dustup but now having some writing of her own published, she’s afraid to go back to the building where Miranda Priestly works. Not that she can’t bear to see Priestly. The penultimate scene has her checking around for other lackeys she worked with because she’s afraid they may look down on her outfit.
Title: The Devil wears Prada
Author: Lauren Weisberger
Imprint / publisher: Broadway Books / Random House
Format: Paperback
Length: 360 p.
Publication date: May 2006 (originally 2003)
ISBN-10: 0-7679-2595-5
Subject: Periodicals — Publishing — Fiction
Subject: New York (N.Y.) — Fiction
Subject: Fashion editors — Fiction
Subject: Women editors — Fiction
Subject: Supervisors — Fiction
LC classification: PS3623.E453D485 2003
