Summary: The Summer of Broken Rules

The GIST

The Summer of Broken Rules by K.L. Walther is a young adult romance with salt in its hair and a lump in its throat. Published in 2021 by Sourcebooks Fire, it follows Meredith Fox back to Martha's Vineyard, the island where her big, noisy family has spent every summer she can remember. This time is different. It is her first trip back since her older sister Claire was killed in a car crash about a year and a half earlier, the whole clan is gathering for a cousin's wedding, and her boyfriend of four years has just dumped her. What rescues the week, and upends it, is a family tradition: a sprawling game of Assassin fought with water guns, and the very cute groomsman she ends up playing it with.

The book became a favorite on BookTok and among readers who love a novel built around a place people return to year after year. It is a breezy read, packed with Taylor Swift references, wedding festivities, inside jokes and pie, yet grief runs under every page. Walther's subject is how a person who has lost someone learns to have fun again without feeling that she is betraying the one who is gone.

The Story

The story unfolds over a handful of days in the run-up to the wedding. Meredith and her parents take the ferry over to the island, and from the first scene Claire's absence shapes everything. At lunch they order truffle fries, something Claire always took charge of, and they eat them at a table with a fourth chair nobody sits in. On the boat Meredith's ex, Ben, starts texting as though nothing had happened. He ended things at his own graduation party and then offered to come to the wedding as her date anyway. She tells him exactly what she thinks of him and hangs up. Then, restless in the cramped car deck, she climbs out through the sunroof, a stunt she and Claire used to do together, swings down, and accidentally kicks a stranger in the face. She runs for it, hidden behind a hat and sunglasses.

The family's summer home is the Farm, a big stretch of land by the water with outdoor showers, a pond, oysters and room for cousins by the dozen. Presiding over it are Meredith's grandparents, known to everyone as Wink and Honey. The bride is her cousin Sarah, who is marrying Michael. At the welcome cookout Meredith sees her childhood island friends again and feels how badly she has let things slide, above all with Luli, whose messages she left unanswered for months.

Then Sarah and Michael spring their surprise. Every guest has been signed up, without knowing it, for Assassin, and this year the game is being played in honor of Claire, who was its undefeated champion. The rules, recited by Wink and Honey as commissioners, are simple. Each player is given a target to eliminate with a water gun, and inherits the next target when they succeed. Play runs around the clock. It happens outdoors only. And nothing is allowed to get in the way of a wedding event. Meredith makes a private vow: she is going to win this for her sister.

It is at the cookout, too, that she is properly introduced to the bruised stranger from the ferry. He is Wit, Michael's stepbrother from Vermont and one of the groomsmen. Mortified, she acts as if they have never met and hopes her disguise worked.

It did not. That night, unable to sleep in the bunk room she used to share with Claire, Meredith wanders the dark property and runs into Wit, who cheerfully lets her know he recognized her all along. He holds no grudge. He has a proposal. She knows everyone on the bride's side, he knows everyone on the groom's, so why not secretly swap information and help each other survive? They shake on it, and add a clause: if either hears that the other's name is going around as someone's target, they will give warning. Sitting in the dune grass with their knees knocking together, Meredith feels something flip in her stomach and tells herself firmly that this boy will be a friend and a partner in crime, nothing more.

That resolution lasts about as long as you would expect. The game gives them endless reasons to be together. Meredith takes out her pregnant aunt in the middle of a meditation session. She falls asleep next to Wit in his room while they are comparing notes. She drives him to Morning Glory Farm for the island's famous afternoon pies, where the two of them invent a couple act for a nosy cashier. What throws her is how easy his affection is, and how closely he looks at her. Ben called her babe and told her she was pretty. Wit tells her she is clever and warm, and points out, accurately, what an affectionate person she is.

He is also there when the grief breaks through. A wipeout while tubing on the pond sets off a panic attack, and Meredith sobs as her mind fills with the crash that killed her sister. Wit steadies her without ever forcing the subject. Later, when he takes the sandy farm road too fast and she freezes, he brakes at once and understands in seconds why she needs to feel in control in a car, something Ben never grasped in four years.

A showy rooftop elimination wins Wit an invitation to the grandparents' family dinner, where he lands, without knowing it, on the tall stool that was always Claire's. At that table Sarah tells a funny story about Claire in New Orleans, apparently forgetting that it happened on the last night of Claire's life. For Meredith the memory comes rushing back: the phone call at three in the morning, the news that a drunk driver had ploughed into the parked car the two cousins were in, killing Claire instantly and leaving Sarah scarred. That night Meredith tells Wit something she has not admitted to anyone, that she is still angry with Sarah for taking her sister out that evening at all.

At a party for the Farm's younger crowd, among string lights and Ping-Pong, Meredith and Wit finally kiss. The same night Ben leaves a tipsy voicemail suggesting they were too hasty and calling her his favorite girl to have on his arm. She answers that he would have been on hers, blocks his number, and feels a weight come off. She sees now that what she took for love was closer to dependence, holding on to the nearest person after Claire died.

Two complications follow. First, Wit admits he is about to leave on a gap year, nine months in New Zealand and Australia starting at the end of August, which turns their romance into something with a deadline, and Meredith has never done casual in her life. Second, her newest Assassin assignment arrives, and the name on it is his. To win for Claire she would have to eliminate the boy she is falling for. She decides instead to shield him so that they can reach the end together, and when he asks her outright whether he is her target, she panics and lies, naming Luli. It breaks the one promise their alliance was built on. Soon Luli confronts her as well, accusing her of once again dropping her friends for a boy, just as she did with Ben, and warning her that this one will break her heart.

How the game ends, what becomes of the lie, and what Meredith decides when the week runs out are best left to the book.

What It's Really About

The romance is the hook, but the novel's real subject is grief and the fear of joy. Meredith has spent a year and a half in retreat. Every tradition on the island has a hole in it where Claire should be. By dedicating the game to Claire, the family mourns her by playing, loudly and competitively, the way she loved to play. The message the book keeps returning to is that the people we lose stay with us, and that going back to the things they loved keeps faith with them.

It is also about the difference between being needed and being seen. Ben treated Meredith as someone decorative to have beside him, and she let herself shrink to fit. Wit pays attention to who she actually is. But the book does not let her off the hook. Her friends are right that she has a habit of disappearing into a boyfriend, and the plot turns on whether she will repeat that mistake or learn to hold on to her friendships, her promises and herself at the same time. The title's broken rules include the rules of the game, the pact with Wit, and the careful limits she has set on her own heart.

Family is the third great pleasure here. The Foxes are a large, close and loving clan who tease one another and show up for one another, and they give Meredith room to find her own way back. Under the celebration there are harder currents too, such as guilt and blame over the accident, and the fact that everyone at the wedding is carrying the same loss differently.

And then there is the setting. Readers adore the book's feel for a beloved summer place: the ferry, the pies, the pond float, the beach, the sense of a spot that stays the same while the people in it change. Reviewers describe finishing it in a single sitting by the water.

Some cautions from the same readers. The love story moves very fast, since the whole thing happens in under a week, and those allergic to instant attraction may roll their eyes. The grieving-sibling-summer plot is a familiar one, and there is little doubt about whether the couple will get together. The book is aimed at older teens: there is strong language, some drinking, and sex that is implied but not described, handled with clear attention to consent.

Who Should Read It

This is for readers who want a warm, fast, sunlit love story with real feeling in it, especially fans of Jenny Han, Morgan Matson and other beach-house romances, and anyone who knows their Taylor Swift lyrics. It will speak most to those who have lost someone and wondered when they would be allowed to laugh again. Save it for a beach, a porch or the last weekend of summer.