“Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo”
by Boris Fishman
Harper/Harper Collins, p 336,
$26.99
A sophomore release from Boris Fishman, an author who appeared on “books du Jour, the TV series when he released his first book,
“A Replacement Life.” If you forgive me the cliché, the fruit never falls too far from the tree, and you could say that it is true about “Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo.” From Russian-Belarus descent, Boris writes characters as wide as legendary Russian rivers, with the same verve and punchy style.
Here we have a couple riding together the deceiving roads of life. The dislocation erupts when they adopt, Max, an eight-year-old boy from Montana, who little by little regresses to a feral state. Not what the couple had bargained for. It is precisely the dislocation that their son brings up that highlight the parent’s own sense of inner dilemma. Who are those Slavic transplants straddling a dual culture and languages, constantly playing a tug of war between belonging here and having the heart at times somewhere else? Perhaps it is this dislocation that will allow the family to survive and for the members to fine-tune how they see life in the future. But first they may have to visit part of themselves, which may not be too be comfortable, just to see who they are inside.