{"product_id":"2940170369553","title":"Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo: A Novel","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe author of the critically admired, award-winning \u003cem\u003eA Replacement Life\u003c\/em\u003e turns to a different kind of story-an evocative, nuanced portrait of marriage and family, a woman reckoning with what she's given up to make both work, and the universal question of how we reconcile who we are and whom the world wants us to be.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMaya 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 the coddled son of Russian immigrants wanting to toe the water of a less predictable life.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTwenty years later, Maya Rubin is a medical worker in suburban New Jersey, and Alex 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.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAt once a salvation and a mystery to his parents-with whom Max's biological mother left the child 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 face down in a river.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSearching for answers, Maya convinces Alex to embark on a cross-country trip to Montana to track down Max's birth parents-the first drive west of New Jersey of their American lives. 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eDon't Let My Baby Do Rodeo\u003c\/em\u003e is a novel about the mystery of inheritance and what exactly it means to belong.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"HarperCollins Publishers","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47102363959536,"sku":"2940170369553","price":27.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940170369553_p0.jpg?v=1763708589","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940170369553","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}