The Cocktail Jungle: A Girl's Field Guide to Shaking and Stirring

Rating:
Summary: A sort of diet Bad Girl Guide that manages to hold its own
Review: Targeted at the twenty- and thirty-somethings who swear by the Bad Girl's Guide to the Open Road, Nicole Beland's "The Cocktail Jungle: A Girl's Field Guide to Shaking and Stirring" is, undoubtedly, a knock-off of Cameron Tuttle's enormously popular Bad Girl series.

That's not to say the Cocktail Jungle can't hold its own--far from it. Excepting the sub-Cosmo fashion tips, Nicole Beland's advice and suggestions are dead-on. From her collected Helpful Hints on how to succeed at live band punk rock karaoke (I can verify that her tips are absolutely correct) to her DIY cocktail recipes, this handy light-reading skip-around guide covers everything just-enough. Know what you're ordering, and who's checking you out, no matter what bar you're in, from tiki to dive.

There are, however, rough patches. The informational snippets are oddly thrown around the book--the book is loosely structured, to say the least--and between the hot pink spot color, Nicole Beland's writing style (she was a senior editor at Cosmo, you know), and Amy Saidens' illustrations, you may at times wish you'd just purchased a magazine in the check-out aisle. Still, Beland's done her research. More often than not, you'll run across a sentence that makes you go, "Really?" and sometimes even "Yes! Yes! Exactly!"

Rating:
Summary: A sort of diet Bad Girl Guide that manages to hold its own
Review: Targeted at the twenty- and thirty-somethings who swear by the Bad Girl's Guide to the Open Road, Nicole Beland's "The Cocktail Jungle: A Girl's Field Guide to Shaking and Stirring" is, undoubtedly, a knock-off of Cameron Tuttle's enormously popular Bad Girl series.

That's not to say the Cocktail Jungle can't hold its own--far from it. Excepting the sub-Cosmo fashion tips, Nicole Beland's advice and suggestions are dead-on. From her collected Helpful Hints on how to succeed at live band punk rock karaoke (I can verify that her tips are absolutely correct) to her DIY cocktail recipes, this handy light-reading skip-around guide covers everything just-enough. Know what you're ordering, and who's checking you out, no matter what bar you're in, from tiki to dive.

There are, however, rough patches. The informational snippets are oddly thrown around the book--the book is loosely structured, to say the least--and between the hot pink spot color, Nicole Beland's writing style (she was a senior editor at Cosmo, you know), and Amy Saidens' illustrations, you may at times wish you'd just purchased a magazine in the check-out aisle. Still, Beland's done her research. More often than not, you'll run across a sentence that makes you go, "Really?" and sometimes even "Yes! Yes! Exactly!"