A couple of months ago when my period came, I slouched over to Tesco’s and got two millionaire trifles, three cheesecake pots, and Revenge Wears Prada, Lauren Weisberger’s sequel to The Devil Wears Prada. I limped back home and retired to bed for the rest of the day with my spoils, like a frail Victorian heroine (which I wasn’t), or a work-shy humanities student (which I was).

I thought it was abominable, badly-written trash, full of inane details (“her daughter, a waifish four-month-old with dual citizenship”) and unlikeable women, and redirected the majority of my anger and frustration away from my uterus and towards Weisberger, who, I was sure, was either running out of money, or had simply developed a taste for besmirching Anna Wintour’s reputation in the most elaborate and prolonged way possible. Rereading it now with my feminist hat on and my hormones firmly back to normal, I take everything back, and am typing this from inside the appropriate sackcloth and ashes (not as bad as it could be, they’re Topshop).

Revenge Wears Prada kicks off ten years after where The Devil Wears Prada finished, on the eve of Andy’s wedding to millionaire Max Harrison, CEO of his family’s media company. Andy has remained in media herself, first writing for a wedding blog, and then, after an unexpected encounter with Emily, for the luxury wedding magazine the two set up. However, what should be a charmed life is marred firstly by the doubts Andy experiences about whether she really wants to be married to Max, and secondly by the reappearance of Miranda Priestly, who has a devilish deal to strike. Personally I would have called this one Faustus Wears Prada, but maybe that’s why Lauren Weisberger lives in Manhattan with a husband and two children, and I’m in my mother’s house in my pyjamas at three in the afternoon.

It is equally refreshing to see the clichés about the sexes’ language and interaction subverted. Max, not Andy, believes that everything is ‘meant to be’, a phrase he uses to describe every bit of good news. Emily remains tactless and shallow, and at times rude and selfish, but then so is Andy occasionally. Emily’s marriage is far from perfect, but she makes it quite clear that while she jokes about her husband’s suspected infidelity she doesn’t want a serious talk about it, and Andy expresses a similar sentiment in another chapter.

When this millennia’s truth, almost universally acknowledged by every relationship expert and unimaginative comedian, is that women just can’t get enough of sharing their innermost feelings and life experiences, it’s a lovely change to read the dialogue and thoughts of Lauren Weisberger’s female characters (captured equally well in Chasing Harry Winston) – women who don’t always want to bond over discussing their problems, women who make unintentionally (or intentionally) unkind remarks to other women without automatically becoming ‘the bitch of the story’, women who argue with other women about work and trust and things that are nothing to do with men.

The romantic relationships are also pleasingly mature and un-fairytale-like. A character is tested for STDs because the doctor suggests it as part of a routine check. There’s no sex on the wedding night (or for a little while after) because the bride feels too ill, and that’s fine; no implications she’s frigid, no dramas around whether he’ll stray because he isn’t getting any, no thinly-veiled ‘How to keep your man interested’ Cosmo-style dialogue.

In terms of comparisons to The Devil Wears Prada, this is definitely a horse of a different colour. Gone are the lingering obsessions over perfect bodies, label identification, and inherently wasteful consumerism that made American Psycho look like amateur hour. Andy and Emily are rather different people (understandably so, given the time lapse), and Miranda herself is actually in the book for a shockingly small amount of time, with Weisberger relying on her mere existence to cast a large and threatening enough shadow.

Revenge Wears Prada is not a perfect book, but due a lot more credit than reviews have granted it. Weisberger writes with compassion about the difficulties women face in trying to balance their home life with their professional duties, and Andy is not afraid to stand up for herself and make her feelings clear whenever she feels belittled or controlled, despite the awkwardness or upset that inevitably occurs. Don’t read purely because you loved The Devil Wears Prada, but it might surprise you, even if it isn’t ‘the sort of book you’d normally read’.