Advance Booking

FASHION FABLES

This book was part of the flurry of reading I went through after reading Inkheart, and I said that my choices weren't that...I had a lot of expectations after watching the movie, but the book let me down.

The basic story is the same. Andrea Sachs is a recent graduate, looking for a job to build her resume, on her way to writing for the New Yorker. She lands a surprise job as assistant to Miranda Priestly, editor of the Runway magazine, and enters the fashion industry. She is regularly insulted by the fashion-snob employees at Runway for being too "fat" and ignorant about fashion. Andy is overworked by her demanding boss, and slowly starts moving away from her family, her boyfriend Alex, and her best friend and roommate Lily, as she gets sucked into her job.

What I didn't like about Andy was that she was too self-absorbed from the start. She struck me as selfish and uncaring, and her reaction when she hears of Lily's accident is downright mean (she curses Lily for being an obstacle). You might say that it's an effect of her job, but I thought otherwise. Miranda's character is not fleshed out the way it was done in the movie: she did not seem as impressive as Meryl Streep portrayed her to be. The ending was also a little abrupt for me. But the book gives a good picture of the snobbery in the fashion industry, the grime behind the gloss- the long hours, the starvation syndrome, the size-zero mania. But if I had a choice between the book and the movie, I would recommend the movie as I think it is more tightly scripted than the book.

Have you read the book? What did you think about it? How did it compare with the movie?

FROM NERD-HERD TO MEAN GIRLS

The title takes longer to read than the story, so I'll just be calling it HOWGAL, the policy that Opal's parents adopt for her. It was a brisk, entertaining read, a nice chick-litty way to pass the time.


HOWGAL is the story of a nerdy Indian teenager, Opal Mehta, whose life revolves around getting into Harvard. When Opal has no answer to the interviewer's seemingly innocuous question " What do you like to do for fun?", Opal's parents decide that HOWGIH (How Opal Will Get Into Harvard) will give way for HOWGAL (How Opal Will Get A Life). So that includes a complete makeover so that she can be part of the Haute Bitchez, party like a rockstar and get her first kiss from her longtime crush.



You might remember that Kaavya Viswanathan was embroiled in a huge plagiarism row regarding this book. With the greatest respect to the original author, I thought that the parts Ms. Viswanathan copied were actually an improvement on the original passages. I liked her style of writing and her heroine too, who doesn't whine all the time. This book makes the point "Nerd is Cool" in a very unassuming way, and also asks a very pertinent question- Would you risk losing everything to win your dream back? But the book has several flaws, major among them being the parents. Trust me on this, Indian parents are not the way they are depicted in the book. They may be loud and controlling, but they definitely do not gatecrash their daughter's party and start clicking pictures. But it is a loss to the writing community that Viswanathan went out the way she did, because I thought she had some potential. In a way, the author's life mirrors her heroine's, as both walked down paths they normally wouldn't have chosen (I'm assuming plagiarism wasn't Viswanathan's motto) to get something they desperately want. Sadly for Viswanathan, her story didn't have Opal's happy ending.

Read another review at: Ramya's Bookshelf