The Devil Wears Prada

My sister will be ill when she sees this pick on my blog. She hated this book, which, along with the Nanny Diaries is the Ur text of assistant lit.(see Chambermaid as an example). She found Andrea, the young assistant to Miranda Priestly, part genius, part monster to be a terrible cry baby and sided instead with Miranda. That in a nutshell is the beauty of the book, perhaps created unintentionally by the author, who no doubt believed all the readers would side with the thinly veiled copy of herself over thinly veiled version of Anna Wintour, the famed editor of Vogue who Lauren Weisberger briefly worked for as an assistant. Instead, you have to deliberate between the woman who worked hard to get what she wants but can be deliberately unreasonably just because she feels like it and the woman who feels oh so sad that she has to hang up her boss' coat. Sometimes Andrea wins and sometimes Miranda does. The subplots with the best friend and boyfriend are quite silly, but the book still has value as a test to see whether you as the reader take the side of the rookie or the old pro.