Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo

January 11, 2016
This touching second novel by Fishman (A Replacement Life) centers on a Jewish immigrant couple, Ukrainian-born Maya Rubin and Belarusian-born Alex Rubin, who live in northern New Jersey with their eight-year-old adopted son, Max. When Max (an “unquestionable goy”) begins acting erratically—disappearing after school, chewing grass, befriending deer—Maya determines that his strange behavior has somehow to do with his being adopted—which Max doesn’t know. With the intention of finding his birth parents (not since the young Maya and Alex first drove Max to New Jersey eight years before, betraying the closed nature of the adoption, have Maya and Alex heard from his parents), and showing Max where he came from, the Rubins set out for Montana, the state where Max was born. As the family, who rarely travel outside of New Jersey, make their way westward, encountering the eccentricities of American culture along the way, the spotlight focuses on Maya, who is overpowered by feelings of parental insecurity and restlessness. After a slow start, the novel, which seems at first like a road trip story, transforms into a sensitive and surprisingly adventurous exploration of one woman’s wonder and suffering. Agent: Henry Dunow, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner.

October 1, 2015

Fishman, whose debut, A Replacement Life, earned front-page coverage in the New York Times Book Review and a Sophie Brody Award from the American Library Association, opens with Ukrainian exchange student Maya Shulman wanting to be a chef and Alex Rubin wanting to get beyond his smothering parents. Twenty years later, they're married, with dreams dashed and an adopted son going wild. Does this have anything to do with his birth mother's departing plea, "Don't let my baby do rodeo"?

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2016
The parents of an eccentric adopted child head west to explore his roots and learn a few things about their own. Maya and Alex are immigrants of Russian Jewish extraction with little comprehension of America outside their suburban New Jersey enclave, so they're not sure what to make of it when their preteen son, Max, acquires a taste for the outdoors. He scares mom and dad by briefly disappearing to explore a nearby stream, has a newfound expertise in varieties of grasses, and he's gotten frighteningly close to the fauna in the backyard. Perhaps his biological parents' native land, Montana, somehow lurks in his genes? It's a preposterous notion, but for a novelist with a sense of the absurd like Fishman (A Replacement Life, 2014, etc.), it's enough to hang a novel on, and he has plenty of insights on how blurrily parents often perceive the nature-versus-nurture divide. Eager to look for the roots of Max's behavior, Maya thinks back to her own past (as an aspiring restaurateur who married to stay in the United States) as well as her scraps of memory of Max's biological parents, a hotel-clerk mom and battered rodeo-performer dad (hence the title). Fishman entertainingly satirizes a host of types (a folk healer, a dotty psychologist, a weary adoption-agency staffer, starchy old-world in-laws), but he's sincere when it comes to Maya, who's at the center of a plot twist that gives the closing chapters their gravitas. This feels almost like a magic trick given some of the narrative creakiness: Fishman sometimes overwrites scenes, Max and Alex don't claim much of the stage, a love-story detour feels untenable, and Montana is overplayed as a punch line. ("It can't be more beautiful than New Jersey," says Maya.) But Fishman smartly observes that the assimilation novel and road-trip novel make good partners. Both, after all, are about finding freedom. A comic novel about parenting infused with emotional intelligence.

COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

March 15, 2016
The title of Fishman's second book (after The Replacement Life, 2014) is the only demand the birth mother makes when she delivers Maya and Alex Rubin's adoptive son. Eight years later, Max Rubin communes with deer in their suburban New Jersey backyard, then runs away from home to float face-down in streams. Determined that the answers to Max's odd behavior lie in Montana, where he was born, Maya begs Alex to drive them the thousands of miles, even as winter approaches. Overall, this is Maya's story. She and Alex are both immigrants from the former Soviet Union, but Alex, who came to the U.S. as a child with his parents, who set up the food-distribution center where he now works, does not struggle the way Mayawho came as a college student and stayed once she fell in lovedoes. At times, the narrative is slow and uncommunicative, it is a reflection of Maya's journey, and it does pick up in the end. Readers will be left thinking about belonging and family, and how varied the experience is for those born elsewhere.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)