I’m hitting this weird spot with Sunday Book Club because I don’t really want to review the books for you, you can find reviews all over the place and the same goes for summaries. So this leaves me in a really weird place where I want to tell you about these fiction books that I’m reading and I want to tell you to read them, but I can’t figure out how I want to do that. Any suggestions? I’m happy to take them!
Did this get too rambley already? That may be the theme of today’s post for “The Knockoff” by Lucy Sykes and Jo Piazza.
Before I even get into this, go reserve “The Knockoff” from your library. Or order it online. Ladies’ choice. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.
Okay, back now? Let’s go.
From the title you can probably guess that it’s going to be about fashion in some way. Well, ding ding ding! You’re correct. However, while this book is based around a fashion magazine, it’s really more about the technology struggle many of us are seeing today today. Before I go into that though, I’ll give you a quick summary of the book:
“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.” – Goodreads
My immediate reaction to reading this book? Well, it sounded like a fictionalized version of what’s been going on with Lucky Mag recently and as I continued to read it, I continued to see parallels. However, while parts of “The Knockoff” seem to mimic the Lucky fall, it also dives into what’s been going on behind the scenes of the magazine industry these days and how technology has effected that culture.
To me there appeared to be three major struggles that the book highlighted:
1. The fashion industry’s struggle over the importance of online presence vs magazine presence and how blogging has changed the industry.
2. The major shifts in technology that have uprooted industries and professional environments.
3. The struggle between pesky whipper snappers who were born with an iPhone in one hand and an older generation who is use to things they way they are.
While I have my own opinion on each of these topics, what I loved about the book was that it covered the good, the bad, and the ugly of each and managed to still tell a compelling story with characters that you can’t get enough of. Each character represented a different argument (good or bad) to the changes technology has caused and managed to adequately represent the arguments for and against each.
Like some other books I’ve read recently, “The Knockoff ” falls into the category of “incredibly hard to put down, almost missed my metro stop” good. If you have any interest in fashion magazines or you just want to read a good story, I’d suggest checking this one out.
