The Devil Wears Prada

March 17, 2003
Most recent college grads know they have to start at the bottom and work their way up. But not many picture themselves having to pick up their boss's dry cleaning, deliver them hot lattes, land them copies of the newest Harry Potter book before it hits stores and screen potential nannies for their children. Charmingly unfashionable Andrea Sachs, upon graduating from Brown, finds herself in this precarious position: she's an assistant to the most revered—and hated—woman in fashion, Runway
editor-in-chief Miranda Priestly. The self-described "biggest fashion loser to ever hit the scene," Andy takes the job hoping to land at the New Yorker
after a year. As the "lowest-paid-but-most-highly-perked assistant in the free world," she soon learns her Nine West loafers won't cut it—everyone
wears Jimmy Choos or Manolos—and that the four years she spent memorizing poems and examining prose will not help her in her new role of "finding, fetching, or faxing" whatever the diabolical Miranda wants, immediately. Life is pretty grim for Andy, but Weisberger, whose stint as Anna Wintour's assistant at Vogue
couldn't possibly have anything to do with the novel's inspiration, infuses the narrative with plenty of dead-on assessments of fashion's frivolity and realistic, funny portrayals of life as a peon. Andy's mishaps will undoubtedly elicit laughter from readers, and the story's even got a virtuous little moral at its heart. Weisberger has penned a comic novel that manages to rise to the upper echelons of the chick-lit genre. Agent, Deborah Schneider. (Apr. 22)Forecast: Author readings in New York, the Hamptons, Dallas, Miami, Boca Raton, Atlanta, San Francisco and L.A. should target moneyed young women, as should a photo of the author's youthful face on the book's back cover. The publisher's hoping this will be the next
Nanny Diaries, and with all the promo and pre-pub chatter in the
New York Observer,
Salon and elsewhere, it just might.