When I was truly at an intermediate level, I would have found this book to be extremely useful. (and on the back cover there is indeed an indication that this is meant for students at the intermediate level) Even though I'm past that stage, this book was still somewhat helpful to me.

If you want to go through this book, make sure you're confident with verb tenses. If you're not at this point, I suggest borrowing or purchasing a good verb workbook like "Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Verb Tenses" or "The Ultimate Spanish Verb Review and Practice", both of which I found to be excellent.

None of the other Spanish workbooks I've gone through (including at least 4 from this Practice Makes Perfect series) have focused on punctuation, abbreviations, acronyms and spelling like this book does (even though only one [somewhat long] chapter is dedicated to these).

In another chapter there is a list of 45 abbreviations that are used in text messaging and emails (examples: "a2" instead of "adios", "bs" instead of "besos", "mxo" instead of "mucho", etc). I was kind of fascinated by some of these.

I liked the sections of idiomatic uses of verbs in certain expressions. "Dar" for example has a list of several expressions including "dar la cara" (to face [up to] someone or something), "dar con" (to find), "dar la mano" (to shake hands - which is different from "dar una mano" which means "to lend a hand"). There are idiomatic expressions as well that do not focus on a particular verb.

There is a review of the subjunctive - that's something that the author doesn't assume you've mastered at an intermediate level, which is good news for many people. The practice exercises on the subjunctive in this book will be helpful.

I liked the exercises in changing a passive construction to the passive reflexive (So that the two ways to say, "The city of Santo Domingo was founded in 1496." are: "La ciudad de Santo Domingo fue fundada en 1496." and "La ciudad de Santo Domingo se fundó en 1496." You must "change" one into the other.)

In this book you'll get practice using "el que", "la que", "los que" and "las que", as well as "cuyo", "lo que","lo cual" , "la cual", "los cuales" and "las cuales". You'll also learn how to use "que" and "quien/quienes" after different prepositions.

There is an answer key at the back of the book for the exercises (of which there are many!). You're allowed to be creative with some of these exercises which is fun but of course the answer key will not help you as much by giving you a specific answer. Rather, the answer key might show a "sample answer" instead which could be nothing like what you wrote. It's still useful to have a sample answer though.

In the last chapter you use what you learned earlier on in the book to write about different subjects, in different verb tenses, and in a couple different formats. Part of this is using what you learned about how to write the date, greetings and closings in both formal and informal letters and how to write addresses on envelopes (because in many Spanish-speaking countries, addresses are longer and the order of the information in the lines varies from the way we're generally used to writing and seeing them in English).

This is another Practice Makes Perfect book that I wouldn't hesitate to recommend. ( )