The Usual Rules: A Novel (Paperback)

~ (Author) "Quarter past six. In ten minutes, Wendy would have to get in the shower..." (more)
Key Phrases: red clarinet, sleeper suit, mother one time, New York, Walter Charles, San Francisco (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin (February 18, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312283695
• ISBN-13: 978-0312283698
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #163,442 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unforgettable Characters, Unforgettable Story, April 11, 2005

By	Antoinette Klein (Hoover, Alabama USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Usual Rules: A Novel (Hardcover)

Wendy is thirteen years old and a fairly typical teen living in Brooklyn with her mother Janet, her stepfather Josh, and her half-brother Louis. On the morning of September 11, 2001, Janet goes to the World Trade Center where she is a secretary and, in the devastating events of that day, is lost to her family forever. What follows is a heart wrenching insight into the numbness, the hopelessness, the rage that filled those left behind.

Anyone who reads this book will have a hard time forgetting Wendy putting up fliers with her mother's picture on them, her regrets for all the ugly remarks she ever made to her mother, and most of all, her beautiful and haunting memories of time spent with her family.

Wendy's biological father has been pretty much of a no-show in her life thus far, but when he learns Janet is missing he turns up and takes Wendy back to California with him and away from the only family she has ever known.

What follows is the story of a strong young girl, a survivor of the highest order. Truly remarkable are the secondary characters that fill this story. Joyce Maynard has done a wonderful job of giving us three-dimensional characters we come to love and appreciate, people who help Wendy and reveal a lot about the basic goodness and terrible failings of human nature. A young mother wrestling with giving up her baby, a middle-aged woman reunited with the child she gave up twenty years ago, a book store owner dealing with his autistic child, a drifter in search of his brother, a good friend who spills the secret about Janet's best friend, and a young clarinet player experiencing first love are some of the memorable characters that people this story. But it is Wendy's two fathers, Josh in New York and Garrett in California, that are pivotal to the story. Both loved Janet and both feel the need to take care of Wendy in quite different ways. And most of all, there is Louis, the young brother who is such an important part of Wendy's life. They shared a mother, but will they ever be able to live together again when they have such vastly different fathers who each live on opposite coasts.

Out of sorrow and terrible tragedy comes a heartbreaking story that will have you in tears and yet hopeful. You will be immediately pulled into this story and feel a part of the happy family life that is about to explode. You will follow Wendy in her journey to California and ache with her as she misses not only the mother she will never see again, but the brother and stepfather now 3,000 miles away and removed from her life. This is a novel about families, how they support us and how they fail us, and how, in the end, it is our inner spirit that sustains us when "the usual rules" no longer apply.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You don't want this book to end., February 7, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Usual Rules: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Where Her Heart Is, February 4, 2003

By	Mrs. Lyla Fox "slyla" (Kalamazoo, MI United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Usual Rules: A Novel (Hardcover)

For decades, fans of writer Joyce Maynard have known what her newest novel The Usual Rules is about to reveal: she is a gifted writer who illuminates what happens when ordinary people meet extraordinary, even, in the case of her newest novel, horrific circumstances. "The usual rules," Maynard whispers in her newest work, "do not apply."

The usual rules are that a mother goes to work and comes home. That is the rule, unless the day is September 11, 2001, and the mother works in the World Trade Center. On that day, the usual rules ceased to apply for 13 year-old Wendy.

From there, this story tears at both our hearts and our hopes. Wendy reluctantly leaves her much-love brother and step-father to travel to an unfamiliar father and an inner strength she doesn't know she possesses. This is both the story of a girl growing up and a girl growing old beyond her years.

As she did in her widely syndicated column and her bestselling "To Die For" and "At Home in the World," Maynard embraces subjects that are too painful, too hearbreaking for less sturdy writers to touch. In taking on the World Trade Center tragedy, Maynard artfully convinces us that we are more than the hand fate deals us. There is in all of us, an ability to cope with unimagined hardships and unbearable sadness.

Reviews at times trivialize Maynard's writing, saying that she deals with "little themes," unimportant subjects. But, as the attackers of September 11 taught us, it is those small subjects which ultimately create the most lasting and signficant outcomes.

Wendy's story of what happens after the darkest day in all of our lives is the stuff that great novels are made of. With her gift for words and her fascination with people, Maynard again eschews the great unimagined for the love of everyday possibilities by chronicling who we were, who were are, and who we have a capacity for becoming. Like Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Judith Guest's Ordinary People, Joyce Maynard's The Usual Rules gives us an unforgetable voice grown too old and wise too soon.