Real Friends Reading Level: A Complete Guide

What Reading Level Is Real Friends?

Lexile GN340L (Graphic Novel Lexile — a separate scale from prose scores, not directly comparable), ACR 2.6, Guided Reading Level S, grades 4–7. As with all graphic memoir titles in this catalog, the formula scores reflect only the dialogue and captions; the full visual narrative experience across 224 pages is more demanding. Our assessment: grades 3–6, ages 8–12. The Guided Reading Level S and the interest level grades 4–7 are the most useful references for classroom placement. For official scores, visit Lexile.com or AR BookFinder.

What Is Real Friends About?

Shannon and Adrienne have been best friends since they were little. Then Adrienne starts hanging out with Jen, the most popular girl in class and the leader of a social group called simply The Group. The Group operates on an informal hierarchy — everyone wants to be Jen’s number one, and the way to stay in is to do what Jen wants, which includes what Jen wants regarding who is in and who is out. Shannon is sometimes in. She is sometimes out. She is never quite sure which one she is today.

The book follows Shannon through the elementary school years in which she navigates this: the days when Jen likes her, the days when Jen doesn’t; the specific loneliness of watching your best friend choose someone else; the compromises Shannon makes to try to stay in The Group; and the moment when she realizes that the friendships in The Group are not what real friendship looks like. Alongside this social story, Shannon also struggles with a fear and a habit she can’t quite name — a tendency to imagine terrible things happening to her family, which she develops rituals around to try to prevent. She doesn’t know what it is; the book doesn’t diagnose it; but it is present throughout and gives the social anxiety a deeper emotional root.

LeUyen Pham’s Illustrations

LeUyen Pham brings Shannon Hale’s 1980s Salt Lake City to life with period-accurate detail — the clothes, the computers, the furniture, the aesthetic of a specific decade in a specific place. School Library Journal’s reviewer noted that “just looking at the setting you really feel you’re in the 1980s,” and praised Pham’s ability to stretch from realistic period recreation into the fantasy sequences Shannon uses to process her social anxiety (spy sequences, fantastical journeys, imagination play). The visual contrast between Shannon’s internal fantasy life and the external social pressure of The Group is one of the book’s most distinctive qualities and is entirely dependent on Pham’s visual storytelling.

Pham has illustrated more than one hundred books for children, including the Caldecott Honor book Bear Came Along. Her collaboration with Hale is ongoing across the Friends trilogy and the Princess in Black chapter book series. The Friends trilogy is the most visually complex work of her career.

Real Friends Themes and Lessons

The book’s central question — what makes a friend real rather than conditional? — is asked and answered through Shannon’s experience of The Group, where friendship is contingent on Jen’s approval, and through the quieter friendship with Jen’s opposite that Shannon eventually finds. The answer is both simple and hard to see from inside a social situation: real friends don’t require you to perform for them. The performance is what Shannon has been doing for years, and recognizing it as performance is the book’s most important moment.

The OCD-adjacent anxiety thread — Shannon’s private rituals around preventing imagined disasters from happening to her family — is handled without diagnosis or labeling. It is simply present, depicted with the specific texture of a child who has this experience but no framework for understanding it. Many readers who have similar experiences will recognize themselves in this thread without it ever being named.

Talking with your child: What is the difference between being in The Group and having a real friend? Why does Shannon keep trying to stay in The Group even when it doesn’t feel good? Have you ever been in a friendship where you had to perform to stay in? What did Shannon learn about what real friendship feels like?

The Real Friends Series

The Friends trilogy by Shannon Hale and LeUyen Pham includes Real Friends (2017), Best Friends (2019), and Friends Forever (2021). Each continues Shannon’s autobiographical story through middle school, following the same characters and social dynamics as they evolve. The three books should be read in order; together they trace Shannon’s friendship experiences from elementary school through middle school and give a complete picture of her social development. All three have sold over two million copies combined and maintain the same GN Lexile range and age recommendation.

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About Shannon Hale and LeUyen Pham

Shannon Hale is the author of more than fifty books for children and young adults, including the Newbery Honor-winning Princess Academy and the bestselling Princess in Black chapter book series (co-written with her husband Dean Hale, illustrated by LeUyen Pham). She lives near Salt Lake City, Utah — the city in which Real Friends is set. She has said that the social dynamics depicted in the book are closely based on her own elementary school experience and that making the book was both cathartic and clarifying. The friendship that eventually resolves Shannon’s social situation in the book is based on a real friendship that has lasted into adulthood.

LeUyen Pham has illustrated more than one hundred books for children, including the Caldecott Honor book Bear Came Along (with Richard T. Morris). Her collaboration with Shannon Hale spans the Princess in Black series, the Friends trilogy, and the Itty-Bitty Kitty-Corn picture books. She lives in Los Angeles.