What a great book! This text provides a positive and dynamic approach to working with self-harming adolescents, a client group with which it can often be hard to maintain a solution-focused, hopeful stance. Written in a friendly and enthusiastic style, whilst retaining a professional and expert tone, this book could be read by therapists, parents or adolescents, although therapists are the group likely to benefit the most.

Selekman divides his book into nine clear and well-structured chapters. He prefaces these with a chapter on practical guidelines for parents of self-harming adolescents, which is sensitively written and provides a wealth of helpful information from both research and clinical experience. It includes a chapter for parents, fits with Selekman's systemic approach, and provides therapists with a helpful document that they can use when working with families or an individual while also wanting to communicate with the parents.

The following chapters provide therapists with a wealth of different techniques to use when working with families, with individual adolescents, or with adolescent groups. Throughout the chapters Selekman gives case examples, transcripts, examples of question sequences and examples of exercises to use. He draws on cognitive-behavioural techniques, whilst retaining an overall tone of solution-focused and systemic practice. This book feels truly integrative. Selekman weaves together different approaches and constantly expands the realm of possible interventions for the therapist. Each chapter can be read as a stand-alone entity, and the book can be dipped into to generate ideas for sessions, as well as read as a cohesive whole.

Most importantly, the book managed to retain an optimism in tone that felt realistic and encouraging. Working with self-harming adolescents can feel very distressing for the therapist, and can generate feelings of helplessness. Selekman is a valuable resource for all such professionals, as a source of ideas, a way of changing your perspective, and a way of freeing yourself up to see the progress that is often being made without being noticed.

My only criticism would be that occasionally Selekman's ideas stray into territory that seems far-removed from the average NHS adolescent setting. Not many clients could afford to implement Selekman's advice of getting an art room set up in the adolescent's home! However, this is very minor pick at a book that I found really valuable, and which I think would be an incredibly useful addition to the bookshelf of any therapist working with adolescents and families.