etiquette

Broken up into seasons, this book presents beautiful and exquisite ideas for a classy wedding reception; from table settings to floral decorations to wedding favors; inventive color palettes; you're not limited to 1/4 of the ideas - ideas easily adaptable to any season.

In preparation for our wedding, I ordered just about every book that I thought looked appealing and got great reviews, literally HUNDREDS of dollars' worth of books! This and its companion, The Perfect Wedding, stood out among the rest.

I liked it for the following reasons:
1. Beautiful pictures of original ideas. There were lots of pictures and lots of ideas. Obviously you aren't going to find a book that has absolutely every idea for flowers or cakes (it would be HUGE!), but the ones that this book included were very nice.
2. Good mix of pictures and text. About 3/5 of the book was pictures and ideas. It was divided up into 4 sections representing the 4 seasons, so you could get ideas for your specific season (getting inspiration from the best of your season is a great idea!). The other 2/5 of the book was resources with phone number, addresses, websites, etc., so you could actually get ahold of the people who put together the beautiful things in this book or go to the places that would give you more of a similar idea.
3. Not just for the wealthy. Granted that I personally am not too concerned with books geared for my budget, this book gave ideas for all ranges of budgets. Of course, some of the cakes, flowers, etc., must have been expensive, but she also gives ideas that are more budget-conscious.

I would recommend this book, no question. It's better than Colin Cowie's, on par with Martha's, and definitely much better than Vera Wang's.

Buy this book!

This book has wonderful pictures of four weddings, one in each season.

The pictures are truly extraordinary, but they are almost exclusively of these four weddings, so there aren't tons of different ideas for each season, rather one "theme" idea for each season. One thing that disappointed me was that her summer wedding was a casual one on the beach, so if you want more formal ideas for a summer wedding you are out of luck. Like other reviewers have said, most of these perfect presentations would be completely out of a lot of people's price range, but you could definitely pull a few ideas that you loved from her spreads and make it work on a smaller budget. By and large this is a good supplementary book on reception ideas, with tons of photos and some good "idea" text (as opposed to "how-to" text.)