Wendy, the 13-year-old heroine of Joyce Maynard’s The Usual Rules, lives in a happy, haphazard Brooklyn household with her dancer/secretary mom, her jazz musician stepfather, and her eccentric little brother. Life for Wendy is fraught with the usual teen angst until September 11, when her mom heads off to work at the World Trade Center and never comes home. Wendy struggles through the days with stepfather Josh and brother Louis until on Halloween night her estranged biological father shows up and offers to take her home with him to California. On the West Coast, Wendy devises her own healing process of skipping school, hanging around with an unwed teen mom, and spending hours loafing at a bookstore. Maynard is very good on Wendy’s grief. She tries on one of her mother’s dresses and realizes with a shock it still holds her mom’s perfume. She’s undone for a moment, then reaches “for the bottle of aftershave on Josh’s bureau and patted some on her neck and arms. If you were going to smell like one of your parents, it was better to smell like the one who wasn’t dead.” She’s equally convincing when she writes about Wendy’s developing relationship with her loner dad and her growing understanding that Josh and Louis are now her real family. This graceful book about loss and adolescence is marred only by its use of September 11 as its milieu. Maynard sketches in some scenes at Ground Zero and some firefighter characters, but in the main the book is really about a girl and her dead mother. Using the Trade Center tragedy as a jumping-off point doesn’t deepen the story; in fact, it seems a bit opportunistic. Maynard should have trusted the elegant, compassionate material at the heart of her book. –Claire Dederer
The Usual Rules follows the story of Wendy, who lives with her mother, stepfather, and little brother in Brooklyn, and whose world is transformed in a single terrible instant, one day in September, 2001. Her mother goes to work that morning. She doesn’t come back. Through the eyes of the thirteen year old, we follow Wendy’s slow and terrible realization that her mother has died, and the struggle of the family to move forward with their lives. Wendy’s real father comes to take her back with him to California, where she is launched into an utterly unfamiliar life populated with an unlikely cast of characters–her father’s cactus-grower girlfriend; a TV-watching teenager with a baby and not much else; the sad and tender bookstore owner, who introduces her to the voice of Anne Frank, and to his autistic son; and a homeless teenager, on a mission to find his long- lost brother. At the core of her story is Wendy’s deep connection and protective loyalty to her little brother Louie, back in New York, grieving the loss of his mother without her. Set against the backdrop of a global and personal tragedy, and written in a style that is alternately wry and heartbreaking, the novel tells 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.
Order The Usual Rules from Amazon for $9.99
Other Kindle Books of Interest
The Secret Life of Bees
There Will Never Be Another You: A Novel
Twisted
Looking for Alaska
