

The Usual Rules
A Novel
Author: Joyce Maynard
Narrator: Amanda Friday
Unabridged: 12 hr 30 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: Tantor Media
Published: 02/22/2022
Categories: Children's Fiction, Children's Social Themes
Synopsis
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.
Absent for years, Wendy's real father shows up without warning. He takes her back with him to California, where she reinvents her life.
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 3,000 miles away, our heroine 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.