YA Review: 30 Days to Finding and Keeping Sassy Sidekicks and BFFs

Hantman, C. (2009). 30 days to finding and keeping sassy sidekicks and bffs: a friendship guide. New York, NY: Delacorte Press.

Clea Hantman’s lively little pink and black handbook on how to make and sustain “girlfriend-ships” takes a close look at what it really takes for women to have great relationships with other women. The book is organized into four sections - “friendship basics,” taking it to another level, “the major pitfalls and obstacles of friendship today,” and the final section on how to elevate your friendship to, “Mount Everest” heights (p. 3). Each of the four sections is divided into chapters with a grand total of 30 chapters – one per day for the thirty-day duration. Each chapter in this book delves into a theme, offers some advice and provides a daily activity to put the theme into practice in your life. Just for fun, the author includes a daily topical haiku at the beginning of each chapter; often these poems are quite humorous. At the end of each chapter there is a musical selection for the day with a brief annotation detailing how it applies to the theme since, “music magnifies our feelings and self discoveries” (p. 3). Extras at the end of the book include playlist suggestions and a BFF Movie Marathon list. This book isn’t perfect. Some of the material may be a little too much (too silly, too sappy, too cheesy), but looking past the flaws it does examine some valuable topics in an engaging and effective way.

This book struck me as quite “self-help-y,” but it does manage to avoid being preachy. In part, I think that this is because it is not directed at teens only, but really to anyone and everyone who is interested in having great friendships. In fact, I found this quirky book very funny and enjoyable to read. I particularly like that the chapters are short and easy to digest. The language of this handbook is so informal and hip, that I felt as if I was sitting down over coffee with Clea at our local coffee shop and we were talking about women and friendship rather than reading a "how-to" guide. The author is constantly including herself in her daily challenges in a self-depricating way that makes her seem more like the girl-next-door than some professional authority figure. I found that the daily exercises and activities she recommends were legitimately helpful for me. I really liked this book because so often I can forget that friendship is based on the simple basics like kindness, interest in others and openness to new people and is not all about how I look or what I wear.

One of my favorite chapters was on kindness. Kindness is so obvious it is easy to overlook and Clea points this out. Talking about kindness could be so sickeningly sappy, but not in this book. I found that the author’s openness and honesty about her own shortcomings made it easier to be honest with myself while I was reading. Clea writes, “But even I can admit that there are times when I’m not so kind. You know when? When I’m overtired or stressed out, maybe when I haven’t had any coffee. Maybe no one was kind to me that morning. And you know that kindness begets kindness. It’s one of those pay-it-forward, contagious-yawn things” (pp. 24-25). This passage seemed like a page out of my own life and made me think about how challenging it is to be kind when I’m not feeling it. In the end – mixed in with all the fun – I find that I like the message that Clea is putting out there: kindness will make me more real friends than the right haircut or the right purse. In fact, the entire book resonated with me because it was making a real argument for taking the focus of relationships off the superficial and onto issues of character that really matter.