She’s baaaack!! The evil fashion maven we all love to hate has returned in Lauren Weisberger’s sequel to the 2004 hit, The Devil Wears Prada. This time around, we’re promised more of the stormy, turbulent trials and tribulations of Andrea Sachs, and her skirmishes with the truly appalling Miranda Priestly, in Revenge Wears Prada. I was so eager to get my grubby little paws on this sucker I think I pre-ordered back in January. Good ol’ Amazon came through and delivered my precious to me a day before its official release – Monday, June 3rd. I was so excited, so eager, so amped-up, that I did something I don’t ordinarily do. I <gasp!> dropped the book I was previously reading and dug right into this one. I couldn’t wait for more of the back-stabbing, the eye-rolling, the truly E-V-I-L deeds of Ms. Priestly.
The first wonky thing I noticed in the book was that Andy was suddenly friends with Emily. Not just friends, but good friends…BEST friends. Are we talking about the same Emily? Really? The girl who made me genuinely appreciate some of the loons I’ve had to share office space with, in the past? Yep, that’s her. Sadly, I just didn’t buy their connection. There were so many other directions she could’ve chosen to take them in. But, what’s a girl to do? I read on…
Best chums Andy and Emily have started their own successful glossy mag, focusing on the glamorous, dreamy side of the wedding industry. My second hint for where this book was going came in the form of the magazine’s name, The Plunge. Every time I saw the Italic script standing out on a page, I SWORE it said The Plague. Please tell me I’m not the only one.
Once I read through about a third of the book, I must admit, I was starting to panic. Where on EARTH was the she-devil?? Let’s face it, Ahn-dre-ah was sweet and all, but I wasn’t all that interested in her boring, vanilla life. Even the melodrama was drab. It was the down and dirty stuff – the angst - that intrigued me. Fear not, anxious readers. The beast eventually does return, though it takes far too many turns of a page to reach her.
My overall opinion, sadly, is meh. The book was alright, but it certainly didn’t live up to the hype of its predecessor. It was…bland. The new characters that were introduced weren’t the sparkling, interesting folk I looked forward to. I had high hopes for Barbara, Andy’s not-so-sweet mother-in-law, but I felt like she was just thrown in as an afterthought – to add a tad bit more drama when it was needed. None of the characters made me want to root for them, including Andy. She BORED me.
I readily admit that the author couldn’t just make a carbon copy of the first Prada book. And, I don’t really believe that’s what I was looking for here. However, a little excitement would’ve been nice, not some collection of schleppy dramatics that any one of us can get on a daily basis by visiting our relatives. I'm so bummed.
3 stars (barely)
3 stars (barely)
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