This is an attractive book, full of photos, checklists, party themes, recipes, and craft ideas. However, it's not entirely realistic or practical. In a section on budgeting, the figure of $250 is used, which sounds pretty steep to me for just an everyday party. Girls are instructed to carry out lots of tasks that parents might like to handle themselves, or at least direct, such as deciding which food should be discarded from the fridge before stocking up on party supplies, shopping, cooking ahead, and cleaning. For teens who are old enough to handle these responsibilities, the party ideas are too childish. Some directions seem incomplete, such as for the pompoms made out of tissue paper. The finished project is shown, but there are no illustrations showing the steps. Finally, the moustache party theme strikes me as a bit strange to me, but I've been told that the moustache thing is all the rage right now.

I took a look at this to see whether it would be a good purchase at the library where I work. I've decided that with a limited library budget, in a town full of families on limited budgets, it just doesn't make sense for us. I discovered that we already own what looks like the best recent book about kids' parties, Soleil Moon Frye's "Let's Get This Party Started." It includes activities for both boys and girls, it keeps the parents in charge of the party planning, and the ideas seem to be more budget-friendly. As far as the needs of our library, all we need to do is make that book more findable in our catalog, and we're good to go.

I received a free electronic advanced reading copy of this book from Netgalley, but received no other compensation. ( )