Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo: A Novel

Written by Boris Fishman

Narrated by Boris Fishman

The author of the critically admired, award-winning A Replacement Life turns to a different kind of story—an evocative, nuanced portrait of marriage and family, a woman reckoning with what she’s given up to make both work, and the universal question of how we reconcile who we are and whom the world wants us to be.

Maya Shulman and Alex Rubin met in 1992, when she was a Ukrainian exchange student with “a devil in [her] head” about becoming a chef instead of a medical worker, and he the coddled son of Russian immigrants wanting to toe the water of a less predictable life.

Twenty years later, Maya Rubin is a medical worker in suburban New Jersey, and Alex his father’s second in the family business. The great dislocation of their lives is their eight-year-old son Max—adopted from two teenagers in Montana despite Alex’s view that “adopted children are second-class.”

At once a salvation and a mystery to his parents—with whom Max’s biological mother left the child with the cryptic exhortation “don’t let my baby do rodeo”—Max suddenly turns feral, consorting with wild animals, eating grass, and running away to sit face down in a river.

Searching for answers, Maya convinces Alex to embark on a cross-country trip to Montana to track down Max’s birth parents—the first drive west of New Jersey of their American lives. But it’s Maya who’s illuminated by the journey, her own erstwhile wildness summoned for a reckoning by the unsparing landscape, with seismic consequences for herself and her family.

Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo is a novel about the mystery of inheritance and what exactly it means to belong.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Mar 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9780062445162

Boris Fishman

Boris Fishman was born in Minsk, Belarus, and emigrated to the United States in 1988. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Travel + Leisure, the London Review of Books, New York magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and the Guardian, among other publications. He is the author of the novels A Replacement Life, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and winner of the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal, and Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo, which was also a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He teaches in Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program and lives in New York City.

Reviews for Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo

[clara53_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is my third book by Boris Fishman (his second novel chronologically: I started with his recent memoir "Savage Feast", then followed with his debut novel "A Replacement Life" - both of which I loved - and now found this novel, his second). Here he surprised me by going out on a limb and getting very insightful with a female protagonist (unlike his other two books - where he seems to be more comfortable with getting into the psyche of male characters). So that was a surprise for me - his getting so deep into the mind of Maya, an ex-Soviet immigrant in this novel and into the plight she is in. As in the other two books, his writing is noteworthy, genuinely intuitive, and truly eloquent. If one were to find a single flaw, I would say that his tendency to insert long fragments (separated by dashes on both sides) into sentences might be considered as one; but then, again, Jose Saramago's sentences tend to run a whole page (!), and his writing is brilliant... So, all in all, another great read from Boris Fishman.

[brangwinn · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Can’t decide if I liked this book or I didn’t like it. I had to read it to the end though, to find out how the parents of an adopted boy find resolution when they leave their home in New Jersey to question the biological parents of the child as to why he might be acting so strangely. I’d like a sequel to the book to see what happens to the boy and whether the marriage of his adoptive parents survive.

[whitreidtan · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

What does it mean to belong? To a family? To a country? Does belonging impact your sense of who you are, your very identity? Is this something bred deep in the bone or is it dependent on your environment? These are just some of the thoughtful, philosophical questions asked in Boris Fishman's new novel, Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo.Maya Shulman came to the US as a Ukrainian exchange student. Her dream to open a cafe and be a chef had to take a back seat to her medical studies. When her student visa was about to run out, she met and married Alex Rubin, a fellow Russian who himself came to this country with his parents when he was just a tiny boy. Alex had his own dreams that he suppressed to go into the family import business. When Alex and Maya discover they can't have children, they adopt a baby. But Max's advent in their family brings up many questions. Alex's parents, and Alex himself, are against adopting, arguing that you don't know what you're getting with someone else's child. Maya wonders if she's an imposter, not really a mother, not having carried and given birth to Max. And when Max at age eight starts to exhibit some strange behaviours, the Rubins decide that they need to go to Montana to track down Max's birth parents, a teenaged couple they met once before, to see if there are any genetic explanations for Max's predilections.The farther they get from New Jersey, the more Maya is gripped with a desire to break free of the stultifying and constrained life she's been living. The open space and the wildness speak to something in her, much as she imagines it must call to Max, being the land of his birth. The road trip to Montana is bizarre and fanciful and sometimes surreal, as is the narrative as a whole. Fishman addresses issues of identity and immigrant life, the feeling of not being Russian anymore but not really being American yet either. Maya, in looking for answers about her strange and quirky son, is really on a voyage of self-discovery, one that will surprise her and her solid, often unimaginative husband both. The dynamics between the elder Rubins and their comparison to everything back home and the younger Rubins, settling for a passionless existence in almost every area of their lives, is well done and realistic. They are separated by not only a generation but also their cultural identification, Russian versus American. Max, as an adopted child, is the literal personification of this, a Rubin by law but not by blood so that he is forever a mystery to them. Fishman has certainly captured a sense of dislocation with its question of belonging and what that means here, both literally and figuratively. Each of the characters is fully formed even if they aren't always terribly sympathetic. The narrative meanders from the present to Alex and Maya's past and has dreamlike sequences along the way that interrupt the otherwise smooth flow. And the road map of where the Rubin family will go in the end feels more hopeful than the tone of the rest of the novel would have suggested. This is, without a doubt, a complex and complicated story with many levels to it, many questions, and a realistic lack of answers.