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The Usual Rules: A Novel, by Joyce Maynard
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It's a Tuesday morning in Brooklyn—a perfect September day. Wendy is heading to school, eager 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 thousands miles away, Wendy is faced with a world where the usual rules no longer apply but eventually 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 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 one another 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.
- Sales Rank: #322601 in Books
- Published on: 2003-02-28
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.60" h x 1.40" w x 6.44" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 390 pages
Amazon.com Review
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
From Publishers Weekly
While the first 50-odd pages of Maynard's (To Die For; At Home in the World)new novel are emotionally harrowing, perseverance is rewarded. Set both in Brooklyn and the small town of Davis, Calif., following the events of September 11, the book tells the coming-of-age story of a girl whose mother goes to work one morning and doesn't come back. Wendy, who must bear the burden of having the last conversation with her mother end in anger, must also help care for her four-year old half-brother, Louie, while her stepfather, Josh, struggles to deal with his own grief. Attempting to escape her depressing surroundings and numb state of mind, Wendy leaves her family and best friend to live in California with her estranged father, Garrett. There she meets a colorful cast of characters, including Garrett's cactus-loving girlfriend, Carolyn. She also encounters bookstore owner Alan, who affectionately cares for his autistic son; a young single mother struggling to parent her newborn; and a homeless skateboarding teenager in search of his long-lost brother. The lack of quotation marks to set off dialogue makes the text difficult to read at times, and Louie seems a little too adult, even for a precocious child, but the intense subject matter and well-crafted flashbacks make for a worthy read. Though some may be tempted to charge Maynard with exploiting a national tragedy, most readers will find the novel an honest and touching story of personal loss, explored with sensitivity and tact. Maynard brings national tragedy to a personal level, and while the loss and heartache of her characters are certainly fictional, the emotions her story provokes are very real.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-Maynard brings the 9/11 tragedy to readers through its effect on one extended family. Because of a fight, Wendy, 13, didn't speak to her mother that fateful morning before she left for school and her mother went to work on the 84th floor of the World Trade Center. In the aftermath of the disaster, Wendy, her stepfather, and her four-year-old half brother go about in a daze until she is picked up and moved to California by her father. The divorce had been difficult and the girl doesn't know much about Garrett, who has few, if any, parenting skills. In California, her life spreads out to include all sorts of new acquaintances, from Garrett's cactus-growing, maternal girlfriend to an unwed teenage mother with serious coping problems, a homeless skateboarder, a bookstore owner, and his autistic son. The well-developed characters are likable individuals, and each one has a different view of life. In the end, Wendy has learned a new set of life principles that includes an appreciation for those who love her and for the variety of insights others have to offer. This story could have been maudlin and overwrought; it is instead immensely readable and thought provoking. Wendy is a real teen and her ecisions are correct for her and the young woman she is becoming. This well- paced novel looks forward positively rather than backward with anguish, and will reward those who pick it up.
Susan H. Woodcock, Fairfax County Public Library, Chantilly, VA
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Story of Hope
By Vrae
Wendy is 13, she lived with her mom, step dad and little brother Louie. However her mom worked in the twin towers, she never came home after 9/11. This sounds like it will be very sad story. However Wendy is a fighter, and I was rooting for her survival throughout the book. Was amazed at the strangers who helped pull her through this crises in her young life. It is a story of hope. I love Joyce Maynards writing.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Maynard bends usual rules in sensitive exploration of loss
By Bruce J. Wasser
In the afterword of Joyce Maynard's sensitive and instructive "The Usual Rules," the author shares with readers her motivation in writing the novel. She hopes to "tell the story of how it is that a young person can survive great and terrible heartbreak" and restore a sense of hope about her future. Not only does Maynard succeed in this goal, but she has also crafted a work that deals with adolescent identity, family reformation and person response to social disaster. Using sympathetic characters who struggle with sudden death, the author brings needed insight as to how Americans might overcome the trauma of September 11.
Thirteen-year-old Wendy complains about her mother's inability to understand her; she bristles contemptuously over her mother's sense of outrage about the father who abandoned both. Despite the fact that Wendy has an adoring, creative and energetic step-father and a step-brother who worships her, she wades through her days awash in angst. September 11, 2002 changes all that. Everything that was stable, permanent, accepted crumbles; that which was certain becomes ambiguous. "Nothing was as it seemed -- that was what she understood now."
Submerged in grief, her step-father Josh consents to Wendy leaving her Brooklyn home to spend time with her biological father, Garrett, who has created a life in Davis, California. During this time of exile, Wendy confronts not only her grief, but her need to form an identity which will last the rest of her life. This task, daunting as it is with an intact family, is made all the more difficult in a strange, unfamiliar environment.
Wendy reinvents herself, on occasion through subversion (when she furtively drops out of school), through lies (when she meets a warm-hearted bookstore owner) and through compassion (when she befriends a single teen-aged mother). Every person she meets carries the scars of ruin and abandonment. Her father, Garrett, lives daily with his private disappointment that he has been a failure to his suffocatingly elitist mother. Garrett's woman companion, Carolyn, relives her decision to give up her only child for adoption. The teen-aged mother, Violet, seethes with resentment over her white-trash life and consequently endangers her newborn son with her rage. The bookstore owner, Adam, deals with an adult autistic son and a wife who is about to end their marriage as a consequence of her own guilt.
What makes "The Usual Rules" unusual is its refusal to present bromides and cliches as responses to unprecedented grief and anguish. The characters' suffering is genuine, as is their iron-willed drive to regain a sense of life. How should grieving progress? What resources can we seek to give us a sense of hope amidst the deepest despair. When do we find the ability to understand, as we have never done before "how precious everything" is.
Written by a talented author whose knowledge of the bruised heart informs every page, "The Usual Rules" has compelling narrative drive, beautifully rendered characters and realistic dialogue. Above all, the novel is suffused with a sense of the possibility of renewal and hope, even when all around its wonderful protagonist radiates death and loss.
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
You don't want this book to end.
By A Customer
This was a great book! I feel like the characters became my friends and I miss them since I finished the book. Your heart will ache for the pain that Wendy, Josh and Louie feel.
I know this was a novel but it feels like a true story. Joyce Maynard has taken a tragic event in history and made it deeply personal. In addition to feeling the personal sadness for anyone who lost a love one on 9/11/01 this book is also a coming of age book for young people. I highly reccommend this book as a way to open dialog for blended families.
Old fans of Joyce Maynard will enjoy this book and those less familiar with her will want to read eveything she ever wrote.
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