As an educator (creative writing), this doesn't quite hit the mark for my students, especially those who are Gen Z. It's hard to imagine any of them putting up with a "devil" of a boss; many of them balk at the idea of the old "pay your dues" work attitude. In addition, the writing fell a bit short, so I wouldn't use it as an example.

As a reader, I did enjoy the diverse cast and that characters called out workplace microagressions (though sometimes the tone was a bit confusing). It was a great fit for reading poolside and relaxing. I do recommend it as a fun and smart read.

I was so excited about the novel by Imani Hariri-Kia and was excited to be approved, but after just a couple of chapters, I was a little disappointed. I found myself having a tough time following the "Gen Z" dialogue and pronouns throughout the novel. As new phrases came across the page, I was getting distracted and would sort of trail off. I love the premise of the book and the subject itself. I can relate to the Main Character in many ways, but I just got lost and turned off by the dialogue and lingo.

I really appreciate Net Galley allowing me the opportunity to read and review this novel!

It was too immature for me…the language, the side remarks, etc. I was really disappointed. I hoped for a lot and I really dreaded picking this one up.

Sadly this fell flat for me. The comparison to The Devil Wears Prada + The Bold Type is accurate. Plot lines almost felt too close to The Devil Wears Prada. Definitely an updated version of that story with print and digital staff at odds with each other. This aspect felt very relevant for today’s age.

Loved:
-The overall concept. I have always been a fashion magazine lover!
-First real job and all that goes with that. Crazy coworkers, extra unpaid hours, and a difficult boss. Very relatable!
-diverse cast of characters

Didn’t love:
-The pop culture references felt over the top as if the author was trying to prove this was a new, modern version of this story. Things felt just dropped into the story often without a real need or context. Felt like it was trying too hard. But at the same time, Noora had a BLOG! so many other platforms seem more relevant and fresh.
-making fun of the older editor in chief because she didn’t understand technology. Yes, I get that this is true of some older people.
-didn’t connect or care for the characters. Noora felt very immature even for an early 20 something.
This was a struggle for me to finish.
Thank you to NetGalley and Sourcebooks Landmark for the digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The devil wears Prada for a modern time. This book was really excellent. It addressed a young Iranian woman in the workplace dealing with her own Devil. I enjoyed the inclusive characters and the struggle of print magazine. I really enjoyed how Noora stood up for herself. Strong female characters are my favorite.

A Hundred Other Girls is zippy, fun, and chaotic. Noora is a 22-year-old New Yorker, blogger, and aspiring writer. She lands a job at culture magazine, Vinyl, as the editor-in-chief’s assistant. It sounds like a dream job but Noora soon discovers that her boss, Loretta James, is rather awful and is creating a toxic work environment.

I appreciated the fast paced and energetic writing. As with most stories set in New York City, the city feels like one of the characters. For me, the fast pace also had its drawbacks - I often felt like I missed a crucial paragraph or chapter as the story progressed and important details were casually unveiled as it weren’t the first time the readers had learned of them. The tone was perhaps a bit uneven throughout, leaving me wondering whether we were supposed to roll our eyes at people calling out micro aggressions, for example, or whether it was sincere. I had trouble reconciling Noora’s confident, largely self-aware personality with her allegiance to a person who was unsupportive, demeaning, and deceitful.

Overall, while this wasn’t the novel for me, I would recommend this to younger readers who spend a lot of time online and who enjoy a feel-good story of figuring out what you value and what you’d like to pursue as your career. I was drawn to the description and Devil Wears Prada/Bold Type mash-up and think fans of either will find things to like in this story.

Thank you to the publisher for the opportunity to read this ARC via NetGalley.

Take the cut throat element of The Devil Wears Prada mixed with the light heartedness of Ugly Betty, set it in 2022 and you have this book. An enjoyable but relatable read of someone young starting in fashion. Thank you NetGalley & the publisher for the ARC, in exchange for an honest review.

I was so excited to read this one! I have been following Iman on ig and couldn't wait to dive in.

Overall I enjoyed this book. I thought it was very fun, young, and a refreshing modern read. My favorite aspect of the book was the atmosphere. NYC, the office, the restaurants, all of the places made this book come alive for me. It felt so "on brand" for 2022. So current, and so much like I movie I could hear real people speaking the dialogue Iman wrote.

As far as the plot, I definitely don't enjoy morally gray MCs or ones who make repeated bad decisions. That is what this felt like for me and it was really frustrating. It was very much realistic and in line with how people live, I just don't enjoy reading books like that. I also felt like we didn't dig into Noora's personality enough. I felt like she was so headstrong and strong-willed until about half way through the novel. That is when for me I just felt like I didn't know Noora as well as I wanted to.

Overall though, this book was great. It was fun, it was atmospheric, and it represented so many cultures and types of people that it felt very genuine and real. I enjoyed it!

This book was incredible. I did not relate to Noora in the ways I am used to, which I think is wonderful since I am a white American woman who has never stepped foot in NYC. I started out on the nervous side but was hooked pretty early on and it absolutely paid off. This story was sooo good the descriptions made we want to plan a trip to NYC. I was hoping for more character growth from some of the side characters but it wasn't their stories so that is OK. I also would love more of 'Superman', particularly after the "incident'.

This book is exactly as advertised-- a combination of The Devil Wears Prada and The Bold Type. Overall, this book was just ok. There were a lot of aspects I liked; however, it didn't win me over in the way I had hoped.

What I Liked:
-Iranian-American representation
-Queer representation, including a character in a position of power
-Description of NYC (so strong!)
-Not standing for cultural appropriation

What I Disliked:
-Immature dialogue: I know that these characters are meant to be Gen-Z but some of the language really made me roll my eyes
-Cal and everything about the choices he made

4.5 stars!
A Hundred Other Girls is The Devil Wears Prada for Gen Z.
I really, really liked this book! Noora is a delightful protagonist with a fun voice and great wardrobe. All of the supporting characters are enjoyable as well, with a few notable exceptions (you’ll know who I mean when you read this book). The writing is vivid and descriptive but filled with a few too many Gen Z references that this Gen Xer didn’t quite understand. That didn’t take away from my overall enjoyment of the book though. It did drag on just a touch too long and that why I took off a half star on my rating.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC in exchange for the review.

Thank you Netgalley and HarperCollins for the arc of A Hundred Other Girls. Noora as starts at a Vinyl the magazine as an assistant, but has always dreamed of writing for them. Shortly after she starts , she realizes there is a storm brewing between the paper and digital sides of Vinyl and she is right in the middle. This book reminds me of the Devil Wears Prada and the Bold Type. It has a diversity plus a modern twist. I enjoyed this story and think it’d make a fun, romantic comedy movie.

This is an entertaining, witty, and thought-provoking read! I loved the setting and how immersed I felt in the magazine office culture. There were moments I was lol-ing and times I felt so connected to the character’s experience or inner monologue I had to reread a whole page. I loved the sister relationship in this one too, it felt genuine and authentic.

There were some plot points I felt were underdeveloped which left me confused at times, but overall I really enjoyed this one!

A HUNDRED OTHER GIRLS is also great for discussion, this would be a fun book club choice!

I had a hard time with this book. I wanted to like it, but it seemed like it was trying to hard to be of the moment/Gen Z friendly.

I received an eARC of this book months ago and enthusiastically dove in. In the end, I finished this book months later only because I ended up stuck on a long subway ride, and this was the only book I had downloaded on my phone.

Let’s talk about the good, the bad & the ugly aspects of this book.


The Good:

-This book really is what it promises to be. If you want a shockingly similar plot to the Devil Wears Prada (and, truly, the similarities are endless–there’s the popular magazine with an internal power struggle and the plucky wannabe journalist stuck as an assistant to the old guard EIC who can’t help but involve herself in the workplace drama, the unsupportive friends, or, in this case, (view spoiler) and the love interest ​​(view spoiler)... even the MC’s final decision (view spoiler) seems to echo tDWP) peppered with all the cringe-factor, zillennial buzzwords and socially conscious plot points of the Bold Type, then this is the book for you.

-There really is some great diversity in the cast of characters. I appreciated that queer characters were just allowed to exist in this book; they weren’t expected to live out or tell a coming out story or act as a written defense of LGBTQ+ rights–they were just allowed to be characters. The diverse backgrounds, ethnicities and identities of the characters were an accurate picture of New York in so many ways and the strong racial/class/identity divide between the print & online segments of the magazine was well-executed.

-The Iranian-American MC offers a perspective I will be grateful for the opportunity to have read for a very, very long time. Hariri-Kia writes eloquently about the experiences of Middle Eastern immigrants in a post-9/11 New York. I particularly appreciated the conversation around the(view spoiler).

-The rather hilarious repeated use of voting for Hillary Clinton as a verbal defense for bad behavior by white men


The Bad:

-my personal pet peeve: incorrect french. I understand that “comme des fuck down” is supposed to be a cheeky reference to Comme des Garçons… but I hate it.

-“Ladies, gentlemen, and nonbinary honeys”

-A clip of a fictitious news article completely seriously referring to the subject of the article as “the hypebeast”

-A few more words I never want to read or hear again in my life: “Major Atticus Finch zaddy vibes”


The Ugly:

-For a book that concerns itself so much with the morality and performativity of “wokeness”–coming to a conclusion on this theme in the final pages, which is something I’ll leave for you to explore, and perhaps most notably addressing the racial microaggressions made by a character you are supposed to assume to be ‘woke’ based on her allegiance to the online segment of the magazine, prompting the MC to dismiss her as a white feminist only to backtrack on that immediately once said character insults someone else for being a white feminist on the next page (of course, without any change of heart or remorse, etc, that might justify the MC’s wishy-washy retraction of her opinion on this character in which she says she “mistakenly misjudged [her] as being white feminist herself”–, it doesn’t exist without its own problems. Perhaps my least favorite of these issues lies in this conversation:

“She’s a psycho,” I finally spit out. Kelsea claps her hands excitedly.
“She’s totally bipolar, right?!”
“Well, I wouldn’t say that.” As much as I can’t stand Loretta, I don’t want to go around diagnosing people with a real mental illness. I don’t fuck with that.


As it turns out, the MC does absolutely fuck with that, as she goes on to then agree about the bosses bipolarity in every other way, highlighting her sometimes kind and sometimes excessively rude or downright cruel behavior in the workplace as traits of bipolar mood swings.

Or, in another ugly mental health/abuse-related moment…

“Of course, Loretta gaslights me for this mishap.”


And of course this is followed by no actual gaslighting.

-This quote: “You have an empty JUUL pod where your heart used to be.”
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The Gen Z Devil Wears Prada! This is a fun, fast-paced read for anyone that ever wanted to work in magazines. Absolutely loved it.

This is definitely one of those weird reviews to write. My enjoyment level of this book was easily 5 stars. I couldn’t put it down and thought the writing was hilarious! But there were some plot points that made me go “hmm.” Noora made some choices that I really didn’t understand, and the petty inter-office fighting felt so childish that I had a hard time believing it. Like huge plot points that I was like “are these actually adults?” There were also a bunch of smaller things that didn’t seem to add up for me. Now I don’t want this to come off as a negative review, because I really did enjoy the reading experience! I loved the diverse representation and the witty prose. Iman Hariri-Kia is extremely talented, and I love the voice she brings to her writing, but I do think the plot could have been refined just a little bit more. I’d recommend this for an easy, fun read that tackles some heavier issues as well!

A Hundred Other Girls by Ivan Hariri-Kia is the story of Noora and Vinyl magazine. Noora is a Middle Eastern-American woman living in New York City and finding her way as a writer. She has been writing on her blog, NoorYorkCity, for years but her first inspiration and passion was always Vinyl Magazine. When an opportunity arises for her to be Loretta James’, legendary Editor in Chief of Vinyl Magazine, assistant she jumps at the chance - even though it means she can’t contribute as a writer. Through her time there she starts to better understand the ever changing print / digital landscape and starts to wonder where she really fits in.

Here is what I loved: Noora and her voice throughout the book - she is funny, authentic, and down to earth. Her voice was the best part of the book to me and I was impressed with the author’s ability to craft it. Unfortunately, the plot itself lacked depth. So much of this story was rooted in relationships - good, bad, ugly - but I didn’t feel like we had the chance to really get to know the characters or their motivation beyond the surface level.

While I loved meeting Noora, and would love to hear more from her, I found this book to be a bit dry. It is marketed as The Devil Wears Prada meets The Bold Type - two things that I adore - but this lacked the punch that those works bring, in my opinion.

Thank you to NetGalley and SOURCEBOOKS Landmark for the ARC in exchange for my honest review. A Hundred Other Girls is out 7/26/22.

I had such high hopes for this but it just fell flat. I didn’t feel like Noora was a strong enough main character and it felt pretty forced. Love the premise and the representation in the book but sadly it didn’t come together for me.

I’ve been following Iman’s journey on TikTok, so I came into this book with high hopes. Our main character Noora has a strong believably Gen-Z voice and I loved all of her outfit descriptions. However, her wit almost exclusively hinged on an overwhelming number of pop culture references and I wished the humor was more original. I appreciated how the novel truly focused on Noora’s development as a young woman navigating her first job out of college at a “culture magazine” and exploring the multitude of microaggressions that came with it (both from other characters and from Noora herself). Often in “women’s fiction” books like these, we see the female main character’s motivations center around a man and Hariri-Kia did an excellent job of NOT doing this. Noora’s romantic entanglements were second (perhaps even third or fourth) in comparison to the relationships with her co-workers and sister. Overall, I think this is a cute and clever debut.