I rented a lovely necklace from them for $40 instead of worrying about trying to drop hundreds of dollars on "real" jewelry for my wedding. It was perfect and looks great in the pictures!

FWIW, I've never rented a dress for over $55 from them, and I always feel like I have at least 5-7 pages of dresses to choose from at that price point.

Well, dry cleaning is included in the fees, so unless you're drinking kerosene you're probably okay on that front. :)

Exactly! For the price of one dress in my "nice" price range, I can wear 3 or 4 different dresses to events, which is nice especially when you hit that "wedding year" when suddenly it seems like someone gets married every month, and most of them know each other too.

I don't use them often - 3-4 times a year, but I love it. For the price of one really nice cocktail dress I can wear 4 different (way more expensive) ones instead. With Facebook documenting of basically every event now, I'd much rather have a variety of things to wear than one basic dress that I use for everything.…

It sounds "fine", I agree, but not "good". There's a world of difference between the two.

I like you! Sometimes I think I'm the only one who never enjoys Meryl Streep in anything.

Really? Kendrick sang really well in Pitch Perfect, and I like her a lot. But her primary range seems both lower and narrower than where the Cinderella songs fall, and they're tricky as well. I don't think she's going to come off well at all.

Exactly! If these are the bits meant to draw us in... how bad is the rest of it? :(

I agree. The Anna Kendrick part seemed like that to me as well. Kendrick can sing, but I'm not sure she can pull off the vocally tricky Cinderella songs, and I'm not sure they're in her range either. It seems like this version might be very musically simplified on top of being somewhat Disney-fied, and at that point…

Well, that was actually my original point. I said what Harris was doing MIGHT have been SLIGHTLY wrong, but it obviously doesn't hold a candle to what Hale did. But I wouldn't have felt the need to call out the victim at all if the article itself didn't spend so much of its time creating a false equivalence between…

Well, and this author in particular needs to learn how to let a LOT go. Possibly with the help of therapy and medication.

Yeah, I do tend to forget how easy it is to get ARCs, mostly b/c it's much harder to get ARCs that I'd actually want to read. Good point.

That's true. I was assuming her persona was part of her reviewing, which is not necessarily the case. But the article doesn't really make it clear either way - Harris had some kind of minor prominence, at least, to rate getting ARCs in the first place. And the article says she was claiming to be a "married mother of…

No, obviously not. But I'm also not getting free things for being "semigeekgirl4". Like I said, I don't consider it something to get worked up about. But if you create a fake persona and profit from it (and I love free books, so it's at least a little profit), then that's slightly unethical. That's all.

Yeah, wow. I mean, pretending to be someone you're not on the internet and possibly receiving free books for it: slightly not okay, but who cares? On the other hand, obsessively stalking someone who said something about you on the internet: seriously unhinged. Kathleen Hale sounds like a terrible person, and the worst…

I think some of this depends on how long you've lived together, if you have. We got married six months ago, but we've been living together for 7 years. People keep asking us how it feels to be married, and the answer is... basically exactly the same as being a long-term couple before we got married.

They should be working on their marriage, yes. Not working on coming up to the bare minimum standard of responsible roommate-hood.

So much no.

Yep, us too! I don't regret the money we ended up spending at all. But it's always good to point out that lots of fabulous money-saving tips for weddings aren't particularly viable if you want something that looks more or less like a regular wedding.