The Usual Rules Audiobook By Joyce Maynard cover art

The Usual Rules

A Novel

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The Usual Rules

By: Joyce Maynard
Narrated by: Amanda Friday
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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. An hour later comes the news: A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center - her mother's office building.

Through the eyes of 13-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.

©2003 Joyce Maynard (P)2022 Tantor Coming of Age Family Life Genre Fiction
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I had to put myself out of my he said/she said misery so unfortunately, I have no idea whether or not I would have liked this book. Bummer.

He said/she said

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Narration is horrible, “she said”.

The story is good if you can get past “she said”.

“she said”

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this was a great book and kudos to Joyce Maynard for tackling 9/11. but the narrator nearly drove me insane. her up speak on "he said" "she said" was highly distracting

wrong narrator for the book

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I couldn't finish this book. That's how bad the narration is.
I'm returning this for a print version. Joyce Maynard is one of my favorite authors
and she's also a great narrator. Why get someone else?

Narration ruined a good book

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I could not get into this audible book because the childlike narration was impossible to endure .
Normally I would not want to offend anyone and this lady is probably very nice..but not as a narrator.

Horrible nasally high pitched voice.

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