Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo

The author of the critically admired, award-winning A Replacement Life turns to a different kind of storyan evocative, nuanced portrait of marriage and family, a woman reckoning with what shes 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 fathers second in the family business. The great dislocation of their lives is their eight-year-old son Maxadopted from two teenagers in Montana despite Alexs view that adopted children are second-class.At once a salvation and a mystery to his parentswith whom Maxs biological mother left the child with the cryptic exhortation dont let my baby do rodeoMax 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 Maxs birth parentsthe first drive west of New Jersey of their American lives. But its Maya whos illuminated by the journey, her own erstwhile wildness summoned for a reckoning by the unsparing landscape, with seismic consequences for herself and her family.Dont Let My Baby Do Rodeo is a novel about the mystery of inheritance and what exactly it means to belong.