I picked this book off the library shelf, while looking for something else, intrigued by the title. Elegance? In today’s day and age? And how did this woman become an expert in this subject?
Turns out she’s pretty much self-taught, and the chapters of the book are sections of her web site, which seems to be gone now. Ever since Leong was a little girl, she’s wanted to be Audrey Hepburn. That is her style icon, and she’s gone to lengths to mimic Hepburn’s appearance, manners, and education. Because it’s not enough to wear fine clothing and say please and thank you, you need to be classically educated and think good thoughts. Huh?

While I mostly agree with her dress code- clothes don’t have to be expensive, but they should be the best you can afford because they’ll last longer; clothing should be clean, ironed, and mended; skirts should cover the knees; no plastic jewelry, no piercings other than one in each ear lobe (obviously, we’re in big disagreement here!)- and I certainly think manners should be stressed, I think that one of her basic tenets, that an elegant woman should never draw attention to herself, will be violated by following her rules! Because someone following her rules will certainly draw attention to herself in this day and age, unless they are in some small segments of the population. She will seem old fashioned, even if she tries to, as she says in her Amazon blurb, not look like someone trapped in the 50s.

There are a lot of good ideas in the book, but most will only pick and choose. A lot is pretty basic, things like posture and not cussing and don’t gossip. The book itself isn’t very elegant; it has a lovely cover but there is a lot of repetition. There are also quite a number of typos. I suspect that she copy and pasted her web site into book format and self-published, meaning an editor never saw it. An editor could have made the book shorter (it’s almost 500 pages long) and more readable. Three stars. ( )