Wendy flees to her father and spreads love the way Johnny Appleseed planted trees. The mother goes to work in the World Trade Center, and doesn't come home Wendy is left with a load of inchoate guilt and misery, a devoted stepfather, an adored half brother, and a father in California, who, after years of neglect, is suddenly interested in her. The protagonist, Wendy, is a thirteen-year-old girl who has just begun to rebel against her mother. It is a sign of Maynard's somewhat gauche good-heartedness that she has already produced this novel about September 11th. explores the idea of family as much as she examines the culture of loss. speaks to a generation of young girls who are trying to navigate through a culture of loss, of wanting to belong to a family and at the same time free themselves from the usual rules. Maynard's feel for the workings of a 13-year-old's internal voice distinguishes The Usual Rules in the same way writer Judy Blume did a generation earlier in Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret. Maynard's fictional survivor provides deeper solace than the spiritual cheerleading that often applies to coping with loss in our culture. gift for creating realistic and heartfelt domestic moments succeeds in convincing us that Wendy has found a reason to go on in the midst of her tremendous sorrow, and that she, like her heroine Anne Frank, still believes 'in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.''

As if to prove it, a mere 18 months after the September 11th terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the intrepid Joyce Maynard has delivered one of the first novels incorporating that day's horrific events. Wordsworth's prescription for successful poetic writing called for emotion recollected in tranquillity, but in the post-millennial world his advice is decidedly outdated.

The Usual Rules by Joyce Maynard