So, I decided that BOLLOCKS FIC YOU! will be about what I'm reading, what I've finished reading, and what I'm currently writing. (While I'm always writing, I'm not always finishing. Sadly, there is a difference in my little world.) I also will hint at what's happening on other things I'm working on, but not as much, especially when I finally get everything set up.
I thought I'd start the great USA Thanksgiving Weekend of 2010 by giving a personal review of The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger. I watched the film months before and as a result, kept picturing Anne Hathaway as the main character Andrea. Also, in my imagination, her best friend Lily was the actress who played Lilly from The Princess Diaries. Fancy that! Good thing that the book's version of Miranda Priestly was not Meryl Streep but, rather, whomever I wanted to imagine her as according to Ms. Weisberger's writing. I want to steer away from biases like these at all costs, but I really couldn't help it, it was too easy. (This is starting to happen with the Harry Potter series, too.)
Either way, all mental pictures aside, the book's version of Andrea and Miranda Priestly felt developed for what it was: a simple, almost "popcorn," read. I had both empathy and sympathy for Andrea, especially after having had a glimpse of the fashion industry within the last year myself. Her thoughts of getting through her year-long term with the fictional magazine Runway consistently changed with the progression of the book. I thought that was a really good thing to do- I saw the progression of Andrea's personality go from someone who was unaware of the big city life and too innocent of what she was getting into to a person who was on her way to being a worldly human being, but definitely was still far and away from it at the end.
The antagonist Miranda made me laugh. Her demands were so absurd and her personality was awful. I loved it, she was definitely a great villain to have in a story. It's too easy to create a villain and just have them throw one bad thing after the other at the protagonist without justification. The background for Miranda also gave Andrea a foundation to find out what she wanted out of her life and rounded out Miranda just a little bit. I liked the timing of revealing the meaningful bits through the research in the beginning, chatter between characters, and even Miranda herself admitting what a shadow of her former self might have been. I say "might," since the conversation with her admitting this happened to be when she and Andrea are together alone in a car and she is still cold and inexpressive, according to Andrea's observations of the event - a bias that the book understandably has, considering everything has been written to be in Andrea's point of view.
Supportive characters were important in this book, too. Andrea's immediate family kind of served as a contrast to Miranda Priestly's own, and appropriately, they showed up less and less throughout the novel as Miranda's role in Andrea's life expanded more and more. Alex the boyfriend was O.K. but I think even without him, Andrea functioned well and was still a good character. If anything, I think Lily was the better of the two non-familial people in Andrea's world to both interact with her and be a catalyst to Andrea's major decisions.
Having recently moved away from New York City, The Devil Wears Prada made me miss it a little bit, since the bulk of its action happened in Manhattan. I had an opportunity to see both the Hearst and Condé Nast buildings at one point, very briefly, and kept filling in mentally that the Elias-Clark Building was a combination of those two plus some other offices, but even if you haven't seen those buildings I mentioned, Ms. Weisberger describes the layout of Elias-Clark with enough precision expected from someone who only works in it and not having had anything else to do with its appearance.
I think it is an easy read, took me a total of a day to get through the entire story. I kept going on and off while reading, so I didn't just start on it today. I would recommend it for anyone above age seventeen, since some folks at that age tend to have a grasp of how post-college life might work, due to research about post-high school life or by questioning those that have already gone through college. Since this book happens to be about a woman who is coming into her first career after graduation, I would think anyone younger than a college-bound person might miss out on references or think less of what's going on between characters.
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