Okay, real talk: I went into this one with complicated feelings. I loved The Devil Wears Prada - the book, the movie, the whole chaotic energy of it. So when I finally queued up the sequel during Sophie's nap time last Tuesday, I was equal parts excited and suspicious. Like when a restaurant you love opens a second location. You want it to be good. You're just... not sure it will be.
Spoiler: it's complicated.
Miranda Priestly Is Still a Monster (And I'm Still Obsessed)
Here's the thing about sequels - they live or die on whether the original's magic survived the gap. And the core premise here is genuinely good: Andy and Emily, former nemeses, now running their own bridal magazine together. That's fun! I wanted to see that. Two women who survived the same workplace trauma building something of their own - there's real juice there. Though honestly, Filthy Fantasies is the last place I expected to find a similarly messy, complicated female dynamic that actually stuck with me - and yet here we are.
And Miranda is still Miranda. Weisberger hasn't softened her into some redeemable villain with a tragic backstory. She's still the same arctic, devastating force she was in book one, and every scene she's in has this particular tension - like you're waiting for the temperature in the room to drop. The wedding-day secret letter that kicks everything into motion is a solid hook. I was genuinely folding laundry faster trying to find out what was in it.
But Andy. Oh, Andy. I found myself getting frustrated with her in a way I didn't expect. She's supposed to have grown, right? A decade has passed. She has her own magazine, a gorgeous fiancé, a whole new life. And yet she spends a lot of this book being reactive and anxious in ways that felt less like character depth and more like the plot needed her to be confused. I kept wanting to shake her. I say this as someone who regularly loses her keys inside her own house, so I'm not judging the anxiety - I'm judging the pacing.
Because yes. It drags. Specifically the middle section, where Andy circles the same emotional territory for what felt like three full nap times. For a 13-hour audiobook, you need momentum. This one coasts for a while before it finds it again.
The Megan Hilty Situation
Okay, I need to address this directly because I've seen the reviews and they are divided in a way that feels almost personal.
Megan Hilty is not the narrator from The Devil Wears Prada. If you loved that version, you'll notice immediately. Her Andy is lighter - genuinely cheery and young-sounding, which works for the character in some moments and feels slightly off in others, particularly when Andy is supposed to be in full spiral mode. The emotional insecurity scenes land better than the confident ones, honestly.
Her Miranda though? Entertaining. There's this dry, almost theatrical quality to how she voices her - not quite the ice-queen stillness I imagined, but something more amusingly imperious that I ended up liking more than I expected to.
The complaint about her voice being reedy and reading-to-toddlers? I get it. I have a toddler. I know exactly what that sounds like. It's not quite that extreme, but there's a brightness to Hilty's delivery that can feel slightly mismatched when the story gets darker. I listened at 1.25x and it helped - tightened everything up, made the pacing issues less obvious, and her voice settled into something more natural at that speed.
Survived my 47 pauses? Mostly yes. The story is simple enough that I never lost the thread, which is genuinely high praise given that I once paused a podcast mid-sentence for three days and had no idea what they were talking about when I came back.
So Do You Need This Sequel in Your Life?
If you're a die-hard Devil Wears Prada fan who needs to know what happened to Andy - sure. It's a fun enough return visit, and the Emily scenes are genuinely the best parts of the whole thing. Their dynamic is sharper and funnier than Andy and Max's romance, which never quite ignited for me the way it was supposed to.
If you've never read the first book, do not start here. This is firmly a sequel in the sense that it assumes you care about these people already.
Not groundbreaking, but sometimes you don't need groundbreaking. Sometimes you need a book that's exactly as glamorous and messy as a bridal magazine run by two women who survived the same nightmare boss. Car time approved, with caveats. Borrow it before you buy it.
