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The Bombshell Manual of Style

Admit it: You'd love to be a bombshell. A bombshell wears sexy, gorgeous clothing; she follows her instincts, without reference to men; she revels in her sensuality. Who wouldn't love that? In this book, Laren Stover and Kimberly Forrest dish up a mess of hints for cultivating your inner blonde. Theirs is a delicious guide, full of warm and funny advice for women who enjoy being women. “A bombshell is a woman who has learned to use her vulnerability to her advantage,” explains Stover, “a woman who allows for her frailty and breakable humanity, but does not let it eclipse her aura of glamour.” At heart, aren't we all bombshells?

—Barnes & Noble

Any gal who wants to maximize her bombshell potential should run out and pick up a copy of this hilarious how-to guide that also chronicles the perils of such legendary babes as Monroe, Mansfield and, my personal favorite, Bardot.
—Victoria Gotti, The New York Post

... it offers advice to all women, brunettes and redheads included, on how to detonate the inner bombshell.
The New York Times

Stover, Forrest and their colleagues are not only shrewd and insightfully observant field anthropologists, you sense that they would be personally adept at putting false eyelashes on a monkey.
—Tom Robbins

The perfect little book for anyone who wants to fulfill her own Bombshell aspirations. Just grab your favorite baby doll pajamas, a glass of champagne, and sink right in!
—Marisa Tomei

I loved this book—a great summer, beach read. I have been giving it to all my friends as gifts. Toledo's illustrations are gorgeous and aptly show 'Bombshell Style'... raise a glass of Veuve Clicquot to the authors, and don't be afraid to show your own style to the world!
—Pamela Keogh

With prose and perception of rare and natural grace, Laren Stover, in this lilting livre du blondisme, has given us, modestly and unassumingly and sublimely, a work that deserves a place beside Neumann's The Great Mother, Witt's Isis in the Ancient World, and the complete run of Beauty Parade.
—Nick Tosches

Ten, nine, eight, seven... get ready to detonate! The Bombshell girls have figured out the secret formula: how to mix equal parts lady and tramp. Consider this your literary compact. Slip it in your purse, balance it on your head, just keep it on hand—and refer to it as often as you touch up your lipstick. Kaboom!
—Ilene Rosenzweig

Bombs a-sway
In the aftermath of grunge, heroin chic and minimalism, it's nice to know the next big thing is truly big. The Bombshell (trumpet fanfare, please) is back.
What qualifies a woman—you might wonder, with some justification—as a bombshell?
“She is a compelling bundle of contradictions, a combustible blend of confidence and vulnerability, sauce and naivete,” enthuse the authors.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

BOMBSHELLS TURN HEADS, PAGES IN BOOK
The first thing you should know about bombshells—those women who turn everyone's head and have the world at their feet–is that bombshells are intellectual creatures.
Shakespeare's “Antony and Cleopatra” has a guaranteed spot on all bombshell bookshelves, as does Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and the always classic Pat the Bunny.
These women know about art, favoring Vincent van Gogh over any and all Surrealists. Glenn Miller's “In the Mood" and Tchaikovsky's “1812 Overture” are the soundtracks of their lives.
Bombshells are spontaneous, generous and emotional. They buck the trends, sending a telegram instead of an e-mail and they carry Chicklets in their pocketbooks instead of Altoids.
They love animals.
And, of course, they always are the most stylish women in the room.

“I study them like they're another species,” said Laren Stover, author of The Bombshell Manual of Style (Hyperion).
“She knows how to add a little sizzle,” explains Stover. “A bombshell doesn't have to be classically beautiful, but she'd be the one you remember.”

Mere mortals are excited to be around a bombshell. She creates a mood, she is generous and genuine and she seems to lift the spirits of those who surround her.
But Stover said the most amazing thing she's learned about bombshells during the course of her research is that so many women in the 21st century aspire to be one.
So is Stover a bombshell?
“I have a friend who calls me a 'librarian bombshell."”
—Samantha Critchell, The Associated Press