Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo: A Novel

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...