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Tuesday, May 12, 2015

The Knockoff by Lucy Sykes and Jo Piazza

Product Details

The Knockoff: A Novel
by Lucy Sykes and Jo Piazza

May 19, 2015 | Kindle eBook

Book Description

 May 19, 2015
An outrageously stylish, wickedly funny novel of fashion in the digital age, The Knockoff is the story of Imogen Tate, editor in chief of Glossy magazine, who finds her twentysomething former assistant Eve Morton plotting to knock Imogen off her pedestal, take over her job, and reduce the magazine, famous for its lavish 768-page September issue, into an app.
When Imogen returns to work at Glossy after six months away, she can barely recognize her own magazine. Eve, fresh out of Harvard Business School, has fired “the gray hairs,” put the managing editor in a supply closet, stopped using the landlines, and hired a bevy of manicured and questionably attired underlings who text and tweet their way through meetings. Imogen, darling of the fashion world, may have Alexander Wang and Diane von Furstenberg on speed dial, but she can’t tell Facebook from Foursquare and once got her iPhone stuck in Japanese for two days. Under Eve’s reign, Glossy is rapidly becoming a digital sweatshop—hackathons rage all night, girls who sleep get fired, and “fun” means mandatory, company-wide coordinated dances to Beyoncé. Wildly out of her depth, Imogen faces a choice—pack up her Smythson notebooks and quit, or channel her inner geek and take on Eve to save both the magazine and her career. A glittering, uproarious, sharply drawn story filled with thinly veiled fashion personalities, The Knockoff is an insider’s look at the ever-changing world of fashion and a fabulous romp for our Internet-addicted age.

From the Hardcover edition.




This may be touted as a  different take on the book, “The Devil Wears Prada”, but   any of the ‘gray hairs’ that this book pokes fun at will know in an instant that this is an up dated, tech filled remake of “All About Eve”.  You might even say that it has just a touch of the original 1939 “The Women” added to the mix too.  Granted it really does have a generous helping of The Devil Wears Prada also!

This was really a depressing book for me at the start.  I too, am a tech dinosaur/gray hair just hanging around until I become extinct.  But the more I read, the more I really got into this book and could see that the authors went to great pains not to make those of us no comfy with tech too uncomfortable (plus I really did learn a lot!) with this book.

This is a great, gossipy, bitchy, well written, back biting and hair tearing out frustrating book.  You may want to smack Imogen around a few times for not doing what can at times seem so obvious to the reader…you will definitely  want to thrust a shiv into Eves back a time or twelve. 

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