SuitabookThe Guide
Rosalind Wiseman
- Reading
- Read a section at a time and pause over the questions that feel relevant. Treat its suggestions as starting points for discussion, especially where advice about other people’s reactions may need testing against your values.
- Themes
- Boys’ emotional lives: The book aims to chart the emotional terrain boys inhabit and speak directly to teenage boys about problems they face. The book presents this mainly as information or explanation.
- Social status and relationships: A named question concerns getting out of the ‘friendzone’, where girls are said not to take boys seriously. The situation is clearly included, but whether the book challenges, accepts or complicates its assumptions cannot be established.
- Communication with parents: The book asks how boys can talk to their parents so that their parents will actually listen. The book?s stance on this remains unclear.
- Worth knowing
- Notice how the book handles the idea of a ‘friendzone’ and its advice about being made fun of: does it encourage mutual respect and honest communication, or mainly present social success as the goal?