Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo

A moving novel about adoption and identity

'You're the mother. You will raise him as you see fit. But I want to ask you for one thing... Please don't let my baby do rodeo.'

Eight-year-old Max has gone missing. Again. His behaviour is a mystery to Maya and Alex, his Russian immigrant parents who adopted him as a baby in America. He has started wandering away from home, talking to wild animals, eating grass, and refusing to sleep in a bed. Can they really raise this feral child?

Their uneasy marriage has tamed Maya's free spirit - but when Max is found after his most recent disappearance, she insists that they all drive from New Jersey to the boy's native Montana, to reconnect with his biological family. Maybe it will help them understand his mother's cryptic message?

Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo is a beautifully nuanced and poignant novel about adoption, married love, and what it means to truly belong.

Boris Fishman was born in Minsk, Belarus, and immigrated to the United States in 1988 at nine. His journalism, essays, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The London Review of Books, the Guardian, and many other publications. His first novel, A Replacement Life, won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the American Library Association's Sophie Brody Medal. He lives in New York.