As handbooks go, the Handbook of Homework Assignments in Psychotherapy is a fairly good one. Edited by the academic and clinical experts in homework assignments in psychotherapy, this book is a comprehensive and practical guide to understanding and delivering between-session assignments. Although not the first collection of writings by Kanzantzis and L'Abate – who also edited Using Homework Assignments in Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, the Handbook is comparable in style and layout to its predecessor, yet far more comprehensive in that it extends beyond the boundaries of CBT to include a range of other psychotherapy treatments such as interpersonal psychotherapy, brief strategic family therapy, and emotion-focused experiential therapy. The Handbook is said to be designed for both the beginner and the expert psychotherapist; however, I would argue that this depends largely on the chapter, with some chapters being less user-friendly for the novice than others. However, on the whole, the book is reasonably easy to read and logically sequenced.

The editors introduce the handbook with an historical and theoretical overview in which the issues for the use of homework assignments in different psychotherapies are considered. Part I focuses on nine different psychotherapy approaches with varying degrees of theoretical support. I was, however, a tad disappointed and felt a little short-changed with Part II, which only covers the three client groups, older adults, couples and families, and would have done well to include chapters on children and younger adults. To compensate, Part III brings together a number of specific problems, each impressively authored by the leading experts such as David Clark on Obsessions and Compulsions, and Melanie Fennell on Low Self-Esteem. In practice, the chapters in Part III all have a predominantly CBT focus that, although likely to be of interest to CBT therapists, may appear to be negligent to those therapists with other psychotherapy interests. I thought the use of case studies in each chapter to illustrate clinical examples worked well, although could have been more consistently used by the authors throughout this section. The final section examines future directions for homework research and practice and the penultimate chapter reviews the current evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of specific components of homework assignments in psychotherapy treatment. It highlights the paucity of empirical support that exists for the use of homework to treat particular psychological problems, including some of the problems and the associated treatments written about in the book. Just how important the therapeutic alliance is in relation to the role of homework, what happens to the therapeutic relationship when homework assignments go wrong, and whether clients really believe homework is collaborative are just some of the research questions that the authors of this chapter suggest need empirical backing. The final chapter focuses on the use of homework assignments in clinical practice and is, in my opinion, somewhat gratuitous and repetitive as most of the contents of this chapter have been covered elsewhere. That said, I can appreciate the attractiveness of this succinct chapter to, for example, the CBT student, who is required to produce an essay on “the effectiveness of homework assignments in CBT”.

In summary, this book is comprehensive and a useful reference manual. Furthermore, for those practitioners and researchers who know little or nothing about the therapies they do not specialise in, the handbook can provide a good overview of how homework is used in these unfamiliar treatment approaches.