Young Adult
THE RULES OF US
"A heartfelt journey into a teen's emotional and internal revolution." - Kirkus Reviews
"Intense and emotionally raw first person POV... with earnest nuance, making for a tender portrait of a girl on the cusp of adulthood." - Publisher's Weekly
"Urgent and vulnerable. This is a sensitive and compelling story of love, queerness, friendship, and self-discovery." - Booklist
Come out. Break up. Stay friends?
Jillian and Henry are the kind of couple who do everything together. They take the same classes, have the same hobbies, and apply for the same super-competitive scholarship so they can go to the same dream college. They even come out as gay to each other on the same night, after junior prom, prompting a sudden breakup that threatens their enmeshed identity and carefully designed future. Jillian knows that the only way to keep everything on track is to approach their breakup with the same precision and planning as their scholarship application. They will still be "Jillian and Henry"--even if they're broken up.
Except they didn't plan on Henry meeting the boy of his dreams or Jillian obsessing over a cool girl at school. Jillian is desperate to hold on to her best friend when so much else is changing. But as they both explore what--and who--they really want, it becomes harder to exist within the careful definitions she has always lived her life by. Stuck somewhere between who she was with Henry and who she might be on her own, Jillian has to face what she can't control and let go of the rules holding her back.