Overview
Rules joins the Scholastic Gold line, which features award-winning and beloved novels. Includes exclusive bonus content!
Twelve-year-old Catherine just wants a normal life. Which is near impossible when you have a brother with autism and a family that revolves around his disability. She's spent years trying to teach David the rules from "a peach is not a
funny-looking apple" to "keep your pants on in public" -- in order to head off David's embarrassing behaviors.
But the summer Catherine meets Jason, a surprising, new sort-of friend, and Kristi, the next-door friend she's always wished for, it's her own shocking behavior that turns everything upside down and forces her to ask: What is normal?
That ring of truth is there, in every word, when you read the story of twelve-year old Catherine and her autistic younger brother, David.David hates loud noises. If there's a cloud in the sky, he has to take his red umbrella with him. If his dad says he'll be home at five o'clock, David starts going crazy at five-oh-one. He likes to rewind his movie of Thomas the Tank Engine to his favorite part, over and over and over again. His favorite place to visit is the video store, where he'll even lay on the floor to read the back of the movie box a stranger is holding in his hand. And he knows all the words to Arnold Lobel's FROG AND TOAD.
For Catherine, though, it's a much different story. She hates the way people stare at her brother, or even worse, refuse to look at him at all. She's jealous of the time David gets to spend, one-on-one, with their pharmacist father. She hates David's rules, the strict adherence to which he is obsessed with them, and yet she makes new rules for him every time she thinks of something else he needs to know.
Catherine copes by drawing, and one day she decides to draw the boy in the wheelchair who is in the waiting room with her at Occupational Therapy. David goes there once a week to work with a therapist, and so does the boy who doesn't speak but instead uses a book of word cards to communicate. When Catherine offers to make Jason, the boy in the wheelchair, some new cards with pictures, an unlikely friendship is born. Catherine is also excited about Kristi, her new next-door neighbor, but soon finds out that friendship is a complicated matter.
How do you protect a brother that often annoys you? How can you be friends with the beautiful girl next door and yet be ashamed to admit your friend Jason doesn't talk and is in a wheelchair? How do you make your father understand that you matter, too? How do you tell your mother that even though David needs his own words, Frog and Toad is a special communication between a brother and sister that love each other? RULES isn't just a book about autism, but rather a look into the complexities of a family relationship. An excellent read for anyone who has ever had to deal with someone who is just a little bit different than everyone else.