Welcome to my stop on Pride Book Tours’ tour for The Rules of Us by Jennifer Nissley! I really enjoyed this contemporary YA novel about friendship and queer identity, and I hope you will too!
About The Rules of Us
Author: Jennifer Nissley
Publisher: Labyrinth Road
Release Date: May 9th, 2023
Page Length: 336
Genres: Young Adult Contemporary, LGBTQ+ Stories
Purchase Links: Bookshop.org, Libro.FM, Amazon, Goodreads, StoryGraph, Barnes & Noble
Synopsis of The Rules of Us
Come out. Break up. Stay friends? In this heartwarming queer love story about love of allkinds, exes navigate new crushes, new feelings, and a newly uncertain future after unexpectedly coming out to each other on prom night turns their lives–and their friendship–upside down. Can they figure out how to move on without losing each other?
Jillian and Henry are the kind of couple who do everything together. They take the same classes, have the same hobbies, and applied 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 intertwined identities and carefully designed future. Jillian knows 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 hadn’t planned 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 she and Henry explore what–and who–they really want, it becomes harder to hold on to 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.
My Review of The Rules of Us
The characters in The Rules of Us felt both like authentic humans and real high schoolers. With their concerns about college acceptances, coming out, and friendship statuses, they are quite relatable to anyone who has endured high school in recent years! I found Jillian and Henry to be compelling characters to follow, and before I knew it I had finished the book. Time flew while I was reading, as I was invested in the characters’ journeys and their relationships. This book is one of the first contemporary novels I have read that had queer friendship at its core, with romance supplementing the plot, and I adored it. While I enjoyed the relationships that Jillian and Henry explored romantically with others, the driving force in the book is their connection as best friends, which I adored.
My Recommendation:
If you’re a fan of queer young adult contemporary novels like Imogen, Obviously by Becky Albertalli or Late to the Party by Kelly Quindlen, I would recommend you give The Rules of Us a chance! This book is a fresh and well-written take on queer friendship experiences that you won’t want to miss!
About the Author
Jennifer Nissley (she/her/hers) is the author of the queer young adult novels THE MYTHIC
KODA ROSE, and THE RULES OF US, which is forthcoming from Labyrinth
Road/Penguin Random House in May 2023. Although her first love is writing, she is powerfully attracted to video games, horses, and pretty much any piece of clothing or interior design with an animal on it.
She received her MFA in Fiction from Stony Brook Southampton and lives in Queens with her spouse and their pets, but sadly no horses.
Currently, she’s at work on multiple writing projects.
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