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"Maynard's feel for the workings of a 13-year-old's internal voice distinguishes The Usual Rules in the same way writer Judy Blume did a generation earlier in Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret."

USA TODAY — Kathy Balog, February 2003

The Usual Rules
by Joyce Maynard

2003 St. Martin's Press
Paperback release February 2004
Chosen by the American Library Association as one
of the ten best books of 2003 for young readers

"Joyce Maynard has taken a timely subject and found in it those timeless aspects of human experience that sometimes make fiction more truthful than fact. Any reader who has suffered great loss -- loss of love, of certainty, of trust in the usual rules -- will empathize with, and be comforted by, Maynard’s wonderfully authentic characters. The story of their journey from devastation to hope is honest, heartrending, compassionate, and, in the end, profoundly healing. A jewel."

— Martha Beck, author of
Expecting Adam

It’s a Tuesday morning in Brooklyn -- a perfect September day. Wendy’s heading to school -- anxious to make plans with her best friend, worried about how she looks, mad at her mother for not letting her visit her father in California, impatient with her little brother and with the almost too-loving concern of her jazz musician stepfather. She’s out the door to catch the bus. An hour later comes the news: A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center. Her mother’s building.

Through the eyes of thirteen-year-old Wendy, we gain entrance to the world rarely shown by those who documented the events of that one terrible day: A family’s slow and terrible realization that Wendy’s mother has died, and their struggle to go on with their lives in the face of crushing loss.

Absent for years, Wendy’s real father shows up without warning. He takes her back with him to California, where she re-invents a life that comes to include a teenage mother, living on her own in a one-room apartment with a TV set and not much else; her father’s cactus-grower girlfriend, newly reconnected with the son she gave up for adoption twenty years before; a sad and tender bookstore owner who introduces her to the voice of Anne Frank and to his autistic son; and a homeless skateboarder, on a mission to find his long-lost brother.

Over the winter and spring that follow, Wendy moves between the alternately painful and reassuring memories of her mother and the revelations that come with growing to know her real father for the first time. Pulled between her old life in Brooklyn and a new one three thousand miles away -- in a world where, she has learned, the usual rules no longer apply, Wendy discovers a strength and capacity for compassion and survival that she never knew she possessed.

At the core of the story is Wendy’s deep connection with her little brother, back in New York, who is grieving the loss of their mother without her. This is a story about the ties of siblings, about children who lose their parents, parents who lose their children, and the unexpected ways they sometimes find each other again. Set against the backdrop of global and personal tragedy, and written in a style alternately wry and heartbreaking, The Usual Rules is an unexpectedly hopeful story of healing and forgiveness that will offer readers, young and old alike, a picture of how -- out of the rubble -- a family rebuilds its life.

NEW A short excerpt, added November 1, 2006

Chosen by the American Library Association as one of the top ten Best Books for Young Adults for 2003

Bookreporter.com interviews Joyce: Writing The Usual Rules

A letter to young writers

What other writers are saying about The Usual Rules

The Usual Rules Afterword

Excerpt: Chapter One (in 3 parts)

Excerpt: Chapter Twenty-nine (in 3 parts)

 RECOMMEND JOYCEMAYNARD.COM TO A FRIEND

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