YA review: The Rules of Survival by Nancy Werlin

Matt is 18 years old and a high school graduate when, looking back on the last few years, he decides to write a journal to his younger sister Emmie about how their mother mistreated them and their sister Callie.  The entire novel is told in this epistilary format, with occassional side comments directly to Emmie from Matt about events that occurred several years prior.  The story itself begins when Matt and Callie witnessed an adult stranger named Murdock sticking up for a boy he didn't know when the boy's father physically abused the boy in a market.  Matt and Callie had been suffering through their own abuse at the hands of their mother Nicky, who very frequently left her kids home alone to fend for themselves, sometimes for days at a time.  Matt sees Murdock as a saviour, someone to save him and his sisters from their wicked, mean-spirited mother.  However, he learns that things are never as simple as they seem, and his mother is much more wicked and evil than he ever imagined.