Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo

<p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p>