Ok so remember the super fab mother/daughter duo behind the new book How I Planned Your Wedding? Well surprise, we have a copy to giveaway to one of our WBO readers, and that’s not all. One lucky lady will get a copy of this fun new memoir from Susan Wiggs and Elizabeth Wiggs Maas, AND a $50 gift card to Macy’s! And you can use it for whatever you want… china, silver… a brand new bathing suit to escape the cold.  You know whatever your little heart desires.

Here’s how this works girls.

Tell us the BEST advice your own mother gave you on your wedding day. If you’re a mother tell us what advice you passed along to your own daughter on her wedding day. Leave a comment here on the blog and tell us how your mother made your day super special. We’ll choose a winner at random on Friday, March 11th.

HOW TO ENTER

1. Leave a comment below.

2. Follow us on Facebook, and comment on our Wall.

3.  Follow us and retweet this giveaway on Twitter.

WINNER will be chosen at random on Friday, March 11, 2011 from entries, and will be contacted over email. So give us your stories, your tales and your

Ladies, ladies, ladies… do I have a book for you. I know that most of you are happy to have mom step in and plan everything from the flowers to the food to the favors, but it’s important that you’re working together to plan your big day. A new book from #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Lakeshore Chronicles, Susan Wiggs and her daughter Elizabeth Wiggs Maas tell you how, and keep you giggling through the process, in their new book, How I Planned Your Wedding.

In alternating chapters, Elizabeth and Susan give readers useful advice from both sides of the cupcake tasting table. What do both Mother and Daughter do, when it comes to planning Elizabeth’s dream wedding. For the brides-to-be, Elizabeth imparts useful and charming advice on how to choose and dress your attendants, choosing and working with a wedding planner, deciding on the right approach for invitations, flowers, photographers, viedeographers and other vendors, registries, cake tasting and surviving the big day intact. It’s a wonderful read that will give both mother and daughter a greater appreciation for the other in the planning process. After all, you are doing this together.

Here’s a Q&A with authors Susan Wiggs and Elizabeth Wiggs Maas. For more from Elizabeth, check out her blog. It’s super fab, and way fun. Stay tuned for more fun with Susan and Elizabeth, your chance to win a copy of the book, and more!
Q. Elizabeth, what is the single best piece of advice you can give a prospective
bride?

A. DON’T FREAK OUT. No matter what happens, or how much you want to stab
your mother, your wedding will be the happiest day of your life. Just keep
your eye on the prize. And the prize is not the $15,000 Oscar de la Renta
gown; it’s the man with tears in his eyes watching you walk down the aisle to
become his wife.

Q. Susan, could you also share a single best piece of advice—for the mother of
the bride?

A. Don’t ever lose sight of the ultimate goal of this whole process–the launching
of a magnificent new love. If you’re doing something that doesn’t nudge you
toward that goal, like shrieking over the cost of vegan cupcakes, stop and
take a breath. And above all, leave the Spanx at home. Nobody will think less of you if you
forget to put on your Spanx.

Q. Despite having a very firm vision of the big day, you decided to use a
wedding planner. Why?

A. Elizabeth: I was planning the wedding while living in Chicago, and I needed
people on the ground in Seattle. A good wedding planner pays for herself
many times over, and that was definitely my experience with my team. In
the end, they managed to negotiate some amazing deals for us that saved
thousands of dollars—way more than they cost. Also, they kept me from
going all Exorcist on my mom when we were disagreeing with one another.

Q. Susan, do you think you made any mistakes advising Elizabeth on her
wedding?

A. None that I would admit to in writing. No wait, they’re in the book. I would say
probably my main character flaw is that I have a hard time separating fantasy
from reality. Like saying we should serve live wild-caught Maine lobster for
dinner when I really meant scrambled eggs.

Well, I finally got my hands on a copy of Laura Dave’s new book The Divorce Party and I finished it in 3 hours. I had wedding #3 to attend this weekend, and I read the book en route.

Personally, I think it’s better than her first book, which I loved, but keeps with her fantastically natural writing style and relateable characters. There’s literary twists, character secrets and a Montauk backdrop that tells a story of love, betrayal and self discovery through generations.

I already gave you a synopsis of this book a few weeks ago, and now I’m telling you it’s totally worth going out and buying. Or just point and click… for the resourceful book whores.

A few times while I was reading The Divorce Party, I literally gasped and closed the book in a more movie than book moment of ” I can’t believe that just happened.” Lets hope those movie rights are around the corner. I’ll call it one of this summer’s best beach reads, but only because you can devour the whole thing in one sitting. It’s just that good.

So as I’ve admitted in many a post, I’m a book whore and I love it when I find snarky, smart young female writers I can relate to.

That said, one of my favorite books from last year was a little book by Laura Dave called London is the Best City in America. It was her first book, and I have to say for a first time writer she knows her stuff.

Here’s the synopsis:

Three years ago, Emmy Everett made the painful decision to call off her engagement and leave New York City behind. Since then she has been hiding out in Rhode Island working at a bait and tackle shop and haphazardly shooting a documentary about fishermen’s wives. July 4th weekend has rolled around again and Emmy is mustering up the courage to return home to New York (the site of her own failed romance) to celebrate her brother Josh’s wedding.

En route to his bachelor party, Emmy is shocked when her typically resolute brother confesses that he is having serious doubts about getting married – and he may even be in love with another woman.

Emmy is determined to help her brother face up to this decision – the one she fled from herself. With less than twenty-four hours to go before the wedding, she takes Josh on a road trip to find this mystery woman. Along the way, Emmy embraces her own hard-earned lessons about romance, commitment and what happens when we refuse to let go of the past.

I had the pleasure of meeting Laura Dave last summer at a seminar. She is super nice, very down to earth and she’s a Red Sox fan. Ahh… the trifecta.

Her second book The Divorce Party, debuts today. I haven’t had a chance to read this yet, but if the first book is any indication of Laura Dave’s talents, this is sure to be a winner as well.

Here’s the synopsis:

On their 35th anniversary, Gwyn Huntington and her husband Thomas have invited friends and family to their Montauk home. Instead of celebrating their decades-long love, they are toasting their divorce. This also marks the weekend that their son brings home his fiancée, Maggie Mackenzie, for the first time. Maggie thought she was joining a perfect family, but she is about to reckon with some uncomfortable truths about the man she wants to marry.

A multi-generational story about what it means to share a life with someone, The Divorce Party brings us two immensely appealing women: Gwyn who is stumbling upon the end of her marriage, and Maggie, her future-daughter-in-law, who is trying to navigate the beginning of hers. With emotional candor and surprising humor, these two women find themselves trying to answer the same questions: Can you ever really know someone? When should you fight for the person you love most, and when should you begin to let him go?

Happy Spring Reading!

Hello my wonderful ladies! I am so very sorry for my very long hiatus I had to take from blogging. I do have side projects like work and graduate school…minor details. So, first off my apologies for an annoying disappearing act. I missed you!

My friend Caitlin is wonderful. She is a book whore, like me, and recently over lunch she suggested I pick up Sloane Crosley’s new book “I Was Told There’d Be Cake.” I had heard about it, living in the publishing bubble that I do, and figured I’d give it a whirl. After lunch it landed on my desk via inter-office mail with a little green post it.

“This book is hilarious. The bridesmaids are on page 141. Enjoy.”

Good friends are hard to find.

So I started reading page 141… yes at my desk, while I was at work, and seriously almost peed my pants after reading just the first sentence.

Caitlin is right. This book is hilarious and for the love of David and Amy Sedaris and all things holy GO BUY IT.

“I Was Told There’d Be Cake” is a collection of essays from Sloane Crossley, who according to her bio, has written for various publications including Playboy, Salon, the New York Times and the Village Voice. I also heard a dirty little rumor that she’s a publicist at a publishing house in New York. That may or may not be true, and is definitely irrelevant, but I digress. Her writing is FANTASTIC and seriously makes me want to kick myself for not thinking of writing it first.

Here’s a sneak peak of what you’re missing.

FROM “I WAS TOLD THERE’D BE CAKE” by Sloane Crossley

“There was a steady stream of electronic vibration against my desk. I watched the cell phone seizure with the unregistered display of a 617 area code. Boston? I thought, Who the hell is calling me from Boston?

‘Hi Sloane! It’s Francine,” she chirped.

I responded with the same degree of skepticism I use for people with clipboards who emply familiarity as a means to get me to sign petitions.

‘Sloane, it’s Francine.’

My mental Rolodex began to spin. Bingo. Francine Davis, Class of ’96, Latin Club President, Video yearbook, pot yes, liquor no. Wait a minute. High School? Was I beknownst to myself, one of those girls that peaked in high school and stayed friends 4evR as the backs of our yearbooks devreed we would? Sixteen-year-old me would have been flattered by this notion of female solidarity. Twenty-six-year old me was freaked out.

‘Hey there.’ I cleared my throat. ‘ How are you?’
‘I’m engaged!’
Incidentally, this is an unacceptable answer to that question.
‘Oh that’s great. Wow, it’s been so-’
‘And,’ she continued, ‘I want you to be in my wedding.”

I was stunned. I pulled the phone away and looked quizzically at the hole-punched speaker. Aside from the blood obligation to be my sister’s maid of honor, it had never occurred to me that I would get asked to be in anyone’s wedding. I thought we had reached an understanding, the institution of marriage and I. Weddings are like the triathlon of female friendship: the Shower, the Bachelorette Party and the Main Event. It’s the Iron Woman and most people never make it through. They fall off their bikes or choke on ocean water. I figured if I valued my life, I’d stay away from weddings and they’d stay away from me.”

This is really not even close to the hilarity she brings in this book, but it’s a taste.

Sloane Crossley says it is ” her belief that people who speak of high school with a sugary fondness are bluffing away early-onset Alzheimer’s.”

But, for the purpose of this post, I admit I am totally one of those “nostalgic sugary sweet fondness of memories past” people and I know there are a good handful of people who wrote in my yearbook reading this today, but I promise I won’t ask you to be in my wedding unless you’re blood related.

It’s not all about weddings. It’s about life as a twenty-six-year-old, and really, just incredibly funny.  It will bring a smile into any very cynical day.

This is her first, and I can only hope there’s more to come. Enjoy!

The Best Day of Someone Else’s Life
Due out May 6, 2008
Special Price $11.16 on Amazon.com

There’s a new book due out in May that takes 27 Dresses and combines it with the wittiness of Jennifer Weiner’s characters in In Her Shoes and The Guy Not Taken: Stories, and the sassy friendships and relationship antics of Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City and Lipstick Jungle.

I thought it was just going to be another Chick Lit book, which I’ll admit, I do like, but it sat on my bedside table for awhile before I gave in. But, it’s not half bad. Predictable? Yes. Enjoyable? You bet.

As someone who’s attended several weddings and is and will be gracing the aisle for several more, this book makes light of the nonsense you come across while planning, buying, and attending someone else’s wedding and looking for love for yourself in all the wrong places.

It’s easy to identify with the 27-year-old heroin, Kevin “Vi” Connelly, who is literally a serial wedding guest/bridesmaid and takes us through the hilarious and sometimes trivial requests of her closest friends. But she loves the romance of weddings and despite being inundated with one after another, she tries not to lose site of the real reason for it all.

This is my favorite sum up of the book from the back cover.

“Eleven weddings in eighteen months would send any sane woman either over the edge or scurrying for the altar. But as reality separates from illusion, Vi learns that letting go of someone else’s story to write your own may be harder than buying the myth, but just might help her make the right choices for herself.”

I have eleven weddings in eighteen months. I feel like this is my story too, and I can only hope it ends the same

It’s definitely worth checking out.