Cover Image: The Friendship Book

The Friendship Book

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Member Reviews

'The Friendship Book' is a valuable resource for high school students navigating the complexities of friendships. With practical tips, quizzes, and relatable examples, it offers guidance on being a good friend, resolving conflicts, and understanding the dynamics of healthy relationships.

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The target audience for this book is supposed to be 8-12 year old children, but I honestly can't see myself recommending it to anyone. The content, advice and examples are both outdated and confusing. For example, there is hardly any information to help with diversity in friendships, or social media/online/digital communication, and most scenarios involve in-person interactions where kids are making grandiose plans to ask each other to elaborate activities. The only thing breaking up the extremely wordy over-explanations are quizzes, scenarios and activities that even the author makes contradictory statements about doing. For example, there is a circle activity to work out the people in your life that you trust-- but then the author suggests not listing people's names in case this is hurtful. And yet, throughout the book, the author keeps referencing back to look at the names listed in this activity. But then other activities, like making pros and cons lists of whether or not to keep specific friendships, have no mention of staying private/not being used to hurt others. Towards the end of the book, there are details of what peer pressure is, how to handle it, and how it can be hurtful-- but then mentions there is positive peer pressure, if your intention is to improve a friend's life? I'm sorry to say it, but I feel like this book will leave kids dazed and confused in their journey to make friends.

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This book would be helpful to go over various concepts of friendships. It can be difficulty to navigate specific parts, and this book may help.

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I received an advance reader copy of this book to read in exchange for an honest review via netgalley and the publishers.

The friendship book is a fantastic book for children aged 8-12 years of age. This book has some great friendship related topics and each section begins with a quiz for them to do which adds some fun to it too.
There are many great tips within this book to help support and guide children to make more meaningful friendships, recognise toxic ones and peer pressure etc.
The sections include lots of information told in a way that this age group will understand and is very much like what the children do in school in PHSE lessons, but more in depth and more personal to the child. This book is like an agony aunt to seek help, advise and support from.
The use of this book should also help children with problems such as resolving conflicts and surviving disagreements.
Each section also has some great examples of a scenario/situation that are very relatable, for the child to understand and relate better to the section being discussed which allows them to better understand and connect to situations they may come across in life.
A great resource for any child!

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This book is very interactive and written in a conversational, approachable way. There are numerous quizzes to help young audiences understand where they currently are/what they want. The book also includes example stories of what a fictional person did. The book is non-judgmental but invites the reader to consider what the fictional person did well and could have done better. Each chapter also includes a "Call to Action" so the reader knows what they can do with the information that was just covered. Altogether, this set up makes for a wonderful, usable book about an important and pertinent topic.

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