cover image The Fabulous Girl's Guide to Grace Under Pressure: Extreme Etiquette for the Stickiest, Trickiest, Most Outrageous Situations of Your Life

The Fabulous Girl's Guide to Grace Under Pressure: Extreme Etiquette for the Stickiest, Trickiest, Most Outrageous Situations of Your Life

Kim Izzo, Ceri Marsh. Broadway Books, $14.95 (400pp) ISBN 978-0-7679-1548-9

Think of it as an owner's manual for those Sex in the City DVDs: this book allows""Fabulous Girls"" to get under the hood of do-me feminism and fine-tune their own engines with an emphasis on how the FG""rallies to the cause of decorum."" A follow-up to the popular Fabulous Girl's Guide to Decorum, the volume continues the first person urban exploits of a young female associate editor at""Smack!"" magazine, which yield charming object lessons in style and manners. What to say after a particularly bad work gaffe, how to communicate clearly with a boyfriend or a booty call, how to let an on-again, off-again paramour (here named""Nice"") down easily about not being ready to live together--these are just a few of the situations that Izzo (features editor at Canada's Flare magazine) and Marsh (editor-in-chief at Fashion) handle with aplomb. The book exudes a kind of scrappy elegance and ease in its writing and in its advice, allowing the inner Carrie and Samantha in the souls of""cubicle dwellers"" to emerge with dignity and joy even when money and time are in short supply. As tough and realistic as it is encouraging and supportive, this is a self-help guide for the club-hopper who does not want to forgo a rewarding emotional life.