Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo: A Gripping Story of Wildness, Family, and a Mother's Reckoning with the Past

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 was the coddled son of Russian immigrants wanting a less predictable life.

Twenty years later, Maya Rubin is a medical worker in suburban New Jersey, and Alex is 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 him 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 facedown 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. 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.

Boris Fishman was born in Minsk, Belarus, and emigrated to the United States in 1988. He is the author of the novels A Replacement Life (which won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal) and Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo, both New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and Savage Feast, a family memoir told through recipes. His journalism has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, New York magazine, and many other publications. He has taught at Princeton University and the University of Montana, and now teaches at The University of Austin.