It's a Tuesday morning in Brooklyn, a perfect September day. Wendy is at school when the news breaks: a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center, the building where her mother works. Life changes in a single, terrible instant.
Through the eyes of thirteen-year-old Wendy, we see a family's slow and devastating realisation that their mother has died. While Wendy's stepfather Josh and little brother Louis struggle to get on with their lives, Wendy goes to live with her biological father in California.
Pulled between her old life and memories in New York and a new and strange existence three thousand miles away, Wendy is strengthened by her burgeoning relationship with her father, and by the love and compassion she finds for her family, left in New York to grieve without her.
Set against the backdrop of global and personal tragedy, and alternately wry and heartbreaking, 'The Usual Rules' is an unexpectedly uplifting story of redemption and forgiveness.