Sixteen-year-old Izzy Sullivan doesn’t want her father to remarry. They’ve become more like best friends than father and daughter since her mother died, and she doesn’t want things to change. But her dad goes ahead and marries Anne, who’s pregnant, and, angry as Izzy is, there’s nothing she can do to stop him. She’s got her hands full anyway with her hottie boyfriend, a documentary film she’s making at the seniors’ centre, and constant worrying about her out-of-rehab older brother Jason.

But then Anne’s baby is born prematurely and dies and, to her surprise, Izzy finds herself desperately trying to hold her family together. Just when it looks as if things can’t get worse, Jason disappears back into a life of drug and alcohol abuse. But Izzy discovers she’s no longer on her own. Anne becomes a true ally, and working together they keep things from falling apart and find a way to forge a new family out of the old.

Darlene Ryan’s first novel, Rules for Life, is overpacked with teenage angst. There are just too many issues – nuclear family meltdown, drug and alcohol abuse, father-daughter friendship, stepparents, teen sexuality, the elderly. Not even the peppy bounce of Ryan’s writing style can make the book’s trial-a-minute scenario palatable. Part of the problem is that the “rules for life” that Izzy has inherited from her mother, which Ryan peppers sporadically through the story, just don’t seem well integrated into the plot. It’s a device that worked well in Christopher Paul Curtis’s Bud, Not Buddy, but it seems trite here; readers don’t have a strong enough sense of Izzy’s mother for the rules to feel truly powerful.

It’s also not really clear just who this book is for – Ryan writes openly about Izzy’s obviously sexual relationship with her boyfriend, but doesn’t tell readers how old she is until more than halfway through the novel. Izzy has the making of a first-rate teen heroine – she’s spicy and at her best in the scenes with her boyfriend and at the seniors’ centre. But all that spice goes sour with the endless problems that Ryan racks up for her.