Julie's Review: The Knockoff

Author: Lucy Sykes & Jo Piazza
Series: None
Publication Date: May 19, 2015
Publisher: Doubleday
Pages: 352
Obtained: purchased
Genre:  Contemporary Fiction
Rating: 5/5
Bottom Line: Delicious and engaging
Grab, Just get it at the library, or Remove from your TBR list? Grab!

Summary: 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. ~amazon.com

Review: The Knockoff is a book that I loved every single word of and every single minute I spent reading it. Perhaps it's where I'm at in my career or my profession (HR) but the insight into millennial is priceless. The Knockoff is what might happen if Andi came back to bump Miranda from her perch in The Devil Wears Prada. Although Imogen is no Miranda and Andi was no Eve. While it might be similar to The Devil Wears Prada it really is in a league of it's own. It's smart, witty, engaging and insightful. I'm not into fashion, I'm more into comfortable then trendy and being a fashionista but maybe that's why I enjoy being in a world of which I'm not privy too and learning something.

Instantly, this reader loved Imogen. She's ready to come back to work from a sabbatical and taken on the world of Glossy again but to her surprise it's no longer going to be a print magazine but an online app. Now Imogen knows what an app is but how the behind the scenes works, she's clueless. Enter, Eve Morton, who is what Imogen is not: young, tech savvy and a bitch. Yup, I said it, she's a bitch. And if he were a man, I would call him a douche-bag. She's too cutthroat and backstabbing to say she's just ambitious. You can be ambitious and successful without being any of those things.

While Imogen changes her feelings about technology and starts to understand how to work in this new world, she begins to cultivate her own ideas on how to integrate technology into her fashion world. It's not that she's against moving to a different platform, she just doesn't like Eve's approach to it.

As for Eve well she's so tunnel vision that she can't see anything else. She can't see that even in this tech-based world we live on, you do need to work on personal relationships. Although, that doesn't mean invading some one's personal space.

My good friend, Michelle said in her review that's it's an "us vs. them"  situation and that might be true but I'm not sure of any millennial who would be on Eve's side. She's just perfectly awful. There are some wonderful, hardworking, genuine people in this book. I love Ashley and think she was the perfect person to lend Imogen a hand into figure out the new world of Glossy.com and Eve. She was smart and savvy in ways I really didn't expect her to be.

I really can't say much else other than you need to read this no matter what "generation" you are in. Each of us will find something to identify with and scoff at. I will admit there was some social media references in there that I had no clue what they were and I'm OK with it, until my kids want to use it.

I'm so glad that The Knockoff lived up to and exceed the hype for me. Trust me, you won't want to put it down. 

 Google+