The Usual Rules, Joyce Maynard
The Usual Rules, Joyce Maynard
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
Club: $12.49

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


Synopsis

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. An hour later comes the news: A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center—her mother's office 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.

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.

About Joyce Maynard

Joyce Maynard is the author of several books including the novels To Die For and Labor Day (both adapted for film) and the bestselling memoir At Home in the World. Her essays and columns have appeared in dozens of publications and numerous collections. She is a frequent performer with The Moth, a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, and founder of the Lake Atitlan Writers' Workshop. She is the mother of three grown children, and makes her home in Lafayette, California.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Suz on November 06, 2019

Joyce Maynard is the type of lady I’d love to live next door to. I love her stories. I could grab some kitchen tips, life tips and talk books! I’d love that. This is the second novel of hers that I have come across. The first one being Labor Day. From this you can just tell she’s a baker, always men......more

Goodreads review by Ken on September 19, 2009

Sometimes you go back to the same movie over and over again because you have become very emotionally involved in it, or you need the laughs it gives you, or for some other reason. The same with books, and this is one of them for me. Some laughs here--just when you need them. A huge lot of emotional......more

Goodreads review by Sharon on November 21, 2016

If the Usual Rules is anything to go by then Joyce Maynard is my kind of author. This moving and heartfelt novel had me tearing up at various times throughout the story. Through Wendy a 13 yr old girl we live through the torture of not knowing the whereabouts of her Mum who was working in the Twin T......more

Goodreads review by Christina on April 12, 2009

Once I got used to the lack of quotation marks, I liked this book. The first part, which focused on thirteen year-old Wendy's grief over the loss of her mother in the World Trade Center on September 11, drew me in immediately. I especially liked the chapter in which she finds herself attending the f......more