This book really gives readers permission to - and a reminder that they should - have their wedding be exactly as THEY want it. Want to spend $50 on your wedding? Great! Want to spend $50,000? Great. It's okay to toss away old traditions and create new ones. As someone who is engaged and actively planning a wedding for next year, this book came at a perfect time and it all spoke to me perfectly.

As someone who had a nontraditional wedding and who gets remarried in a new way every year around our anniversary, I thought this would be a great fit for me. Unfortunately, what's breaking all the rules to one person is more of the same to another. I ultimately didn't find anything particularly new and while I do appreciate that it includes LGBTQ couples I still found it too mainstream and bougie for my artistic, bohemian tastes. Also, I wanted pictures and a whole lot of them. It will be good for more traditional folks but it's not one that I'll be recommending.

The New Wedding Book is a refreshing guide to what planning a wedding entails.
And while I really liked the overall tone of "it's YOUR wedding, so do what YOU want", there were points that disappointed me more or less. The most notable examples for me are: calling a 60+ guests wedding "intimate" - I wouldn't use than for anything 30+ guests; still trying to push for some things like "you NEED to at least book a hotel room for the night of the wedding" - some people are just homebodies and I simply think that booking a hotel in the city I live in is a seriously stupid idea. They also sneaked in the very inaccurate "statistic" of "50% or marriages end in divorce" - that's a yearly rate for the US, nothing to do with 50% of all marriages actually ending in divorce.
The book is also very USA/Canada centric and the budgets mentioned there sounded astounding, given I live in Europe. I would have also liked to see notes that laws around marriage vary, not only whether gay marriage is allowed, but also in how the whole process works and the documents needed. I'd note that it's important to understand what is currently expected by law and planning for it is important! And also it's the law that can require anything from a wedding - be it licenses, witnesses, etc. EVERYTHING else is optional, but the book kinda glosses over that, trying to push for more cheaper, but still traditional wedding.

I did enjoy some of the real-life wedding stories they included, but they are added in between text, which means that you turn the page in the middle of a sentence and you suddenly see a block of text that's not related. Unfortunately, some of the stories felt very... unnecessary, e.g. a story of a bride that got peer-pressured into getting a dress she didn't like, but then on the wedding day, the dress "made [her] feel special". What's the moral of that story? Or the bride who had issues with her mum not liking how she's planning the wedding and the story ended with a "welp, guess [I] have to talk [to her]", no note on how that ended or how it affected the wedding.

I'd still recommend the book to people who feel very much pressured into the traditional big wedding BS.

*Thanks to NetGalley and Dundurn Press for providing me with an ARC of this title in exchange for an honest review.*

I love this!

The whole premise of doing what works for you personally resonated with me strongly. This book offers a lot of insight into the whole process of wedding planning and helps with adjusting expectations realistically. Especially during the pandemic! They tried to cover a lot of scenarios and there are a lot of suggestions for thing to pay attention to while planning, that will not occur to you, I guarantee. Having the couple's stories helps feel more connected to all the advice given!