I just finished The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger...and I hated it.
It took me nearly six months to read (although I think being at university is partially to blame for that). I finally sat down and finished it today because I was tired of it staring at me from my bookshelf. I have to admit that I liked the premise of the novel and found the writing to be decent. I loved to hate the character of Miranda and I appreciated the character of Emily.
But I hated all of the other characters. I was never sure why I was supposed to like Andrea's alcoholic best friend, Lily, or her saintly boyfriend, Alex. Every time I began to be attracted to the bad-boy Christian, Weisberger described him in a way that repulsed me. But it was Andrea herself who really bothered me.
Andrea spends the entire book complaining about her job, Runway magazine, and her boss, Miranda. She thinks that she is better than everyone else because she aspires to work at a "real" magazine, the New Yorker. As someone interested in the fashion industry, I personally found her to be quite offensive as she looked down on everyone involved in fashion. I thought she was pretentious and stuck-up (worse than Miranda!) to condemn everyone in the industry based on her hatred of her boss.
I only completed reading the book because I was fascinated by the glimpses into the world of fashion magazines, an industry that I would love to work in one day. While I won't argue that Miranda was certainly a bitch, I thought that the energy of working at the magazine sounded intoxicating.
I hoped that the author, Weisberger, would end the book on a good note by using the character of Loretta (a woman who works for Seventeen magazine and befriends Andrea at the end of the novel) to show that Runway was not a reflection of all fashion magazines. However, Weisberger never truly articulated this point. At the end of the novel, I was simply pleased to be finished with whiny stuck-up Andy.
Maybe it's just me who hated this book so much, but I definitely wouldn't recommend it. I'm planning on watching the 2006 movie (starring Anne Hathaway as the whiny Andrea and the acting goddess Meryl Streep as the formidable Miranda) to see if it fixed any of my problems with the book.
Rating: 5/10