Massachusetts, California, Timbuktu [Hardcover]

Stephanie Rosenfeld (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 29, 2003

In an affecting novel reminiscent of Mona Simpson’s Anywhere But Here, gifted author Stephanie Rosenfeld introduces us to one of the most memorable characters in recent fiction. Wise beyond her years and yet touchingly naïve, twelve-year-old Justine Hanley searches for what’s true and simple—as her madcap mother leads her and younger sister Rona across the country in search of grand adventure and the next great boyfriend.

Colleen Hanley is a creative, tender, and completely lost soul. Possessing an astonishing ability to busily do just about nothing all day, she can’t manage to find a job—or the motivation to hold on to one. With her ex-husband preaching to her about his newfound religion, and a recent string of horrible dates weighing her down, Colleen has decided she’s had enough of California.

Justine knows it’s coming—the signs are obvious. So when Colleen wakes her and Rona up early one Saturday morning, she’s hardly surprised she must go to the library and endure the familiar moving ritual. Colleen pages through maps and tourist books and phone books, looking for their next home. This time, the destination is Massachusetts. They’ll stay with Colleen’s old friend Marie, her husband, Bill, and their kids. Colleen promises it will be the beginning of the rest of their lives. But Justine knows that the truth never just comes waltzing out of someone’s mouth through a smile-shaped opening.

Once mother and daughters hit the road, another story begins to unfold in the guise of the pioneer diary of Zebulina Walker, whose westward journey offers an intriguing counterpoint to Justine’s sudden eastbound voyage. Away from California, as Justine desperately tries to navigate the changing terrain of home, family, and adolescence, Colleen slips further into despondency. Forced to take over all responsibilities, Justine realizes it’s up to her to make sure their little family survives this “grand adventure.” Now if she only knew how to do that. . . .

Smart and poignant, charming and witty, Massachusetts, California, Timbuktu is a wonderful debut novel, a mother-daughter story that proves it’s always those who give you the most trouble that end up getting access to the purest part of your heart.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Justine Hanley, an amazingly resourceful 12-year-old, battles endlessly in this sparkling, madcap first novel to make an ordinary life for herself, her depressive mother, Colleen, and Rona, her cranky five-year-old sister. Rosenfeld, author of the short story collection What About the Love Part?, adeptly portrays the family's slide into disaster, using just the right amount of humor and pathos. In California, the latest loser in Colleen's life, her abusive born-again boyfriend Dale, alienates Colleen from her friends and family. When she finally decides to leave him, she takes Justine and Rona on a cross-country journey to Massachusetts, ostensibly to hook up with some guy she met during her single years. The three move in with Colleen's old friend Marie, who has her own family to look after and grows more and more impatient as Colleen slips into paralyzing depression. As the achingly vulnerable Justine looks on, Colleen ricochets from one boyfriend and job disaster to the next, always looking for love in the worst places and never finding the right kind of job to support her family. Through it all, Justine does her best to keep up her mom's spirits, humor her younger sister and face her own demons in the form of bullying kids at school and a hopelessly clueless teacher. Justine's first-person narration is wry and engaging (" `Go with the flow," was a stupid, hippie way of saying, `Do what other people want you to do' "), and Rosenfeld's decision to intercut the story with ongoing excerpts from Justine's pioneer diary-a school assignment that turns into a coded life story-is a clever device. Insightful and bitterly funny, this is a winning effort.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School-Justine Hanley, 12, the story's narrator, has learned to read the signs. As soon as a Ryder box shows up in her California home, she knows that Colleen is planning another move. Irresponsible, immature, and self-absorbed, her single mother is unable to keep a job or settle down. After a trip to the library to search through telephone directories for the current addresses of rock musicians from her youth, she and the children head for Massachusetts. Justine remembers to copy a map. She has to do a lot of thinking for them, and keeps lists of things that stress Colleen. At school in Massachusetts, she gets an assignment to keep a diary for a pioneer family going west. In the voice of Zebulina Walker, wife of a handsome, useless fiddler, the girl begins a second narrative whose passages are interspersed with her own tale. The account soon begins to mirror Justine's problems. As she is forced to feed herself and her younger sister on bits of food cleaned from the car's floor, Zebulina boils part of an ox hide to feed her hungry children. Both Justine and her fictional alter ego finally realize what they must do to save themselves. This is a compelling, sympathetic tale of an adolescent taking charge while she waits for her feckless mother to grow up. The vocabulary is worthy of OzzFest, so readers shy of graphic language should be warned.
Kathy Tewell, Chantilly Regional Library, VA
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 388 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books; 1 edition (April 29, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345448251
• ISBN-13: 978-0345448255
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.2 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,677,788 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, January 30, 2004

By 

J. Robinson (Thousand Oaks, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Massachusetts, California, Timbuktu (MP3 CD)

Like other reviewers, I was hooked from the very first page. As I read on, I began to love Justine, the narrator, and her funny and also vulnerable sister Rona. I wanted to take the character of Mom and slap some sense into her--or at least, take Justine and Rona away from her. Because I wanted to do those things, and because the story was so compelling, I stayed up late reading and was sad when I finished and realized their story was over. I think Stephanie Rosenfeld did an excellent job writing from the point of view of a 12-year-old, while still keeping an adult and mature perspective. I think what was so compelling, also, about the book was how frustrating it was to read. I was left to wonder if Rona and Justine would be okay (I'm hoping they were). I definitely recommend this book--and I think it deserve more than five stars!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars loved it from first to lastpage, November 28, 2003

By 

matty dice (east brunswick, nj United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Massachusetts, California, Timbuktu (Hardcover)

I picked this book up at the library. New fiction. I couldn't put it down,I enjoyed it. I can tell you there are many holds on this book in my library,and there will be many bought and given as holiday presents. I thought the two stories going on at the same time showed the skill and talent of the author at her best. I read the author's other book "What About The Love Part" an enjoyed the book also. Stephanie Rosenfeld has shown to me and my friends she's here to stay......

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mom is crazy, October 24, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Massachusetts, California, Timbuktu (Hardcover)

By Martin Naparsteck
The Salt Lake Tribune

   
    Mom is crazy. She's also lovable. Indeed, there's no shortage of people who love Mom in Stephanie Rosenfeld's first novel, Massachusetts, California, Timbuktu. But her craziness isn't the lovable kind. She chases after mean-spirited men, refuses to believe the one decent guy who is interested in her, is often too distracted to send her two daughters, aged 11 and 5, to school or to feed them, or even, sometimes, to get out of bed.
    It's easy to label the mother, Colleen Hanley, as self-destructive, but she is, after all, a mother, and she damages more lives than her own.
    Rosenfeld's pacing is marvelous and her narrative voice precise and beguiling. The result is a depressing and wonderful novel.
    Few techniques so clearly separate the merely competent writer from the highly skilled one as pacing. Rosenfeld moves her story along slowly and inevitably. In one minor event after another, she convinces the reader that Mom moves from happy to uncontrollable depression, and 11-year-old Justine moves from unquestioning love to despair bordering on helplessness, while 5-year-old Rona moves from depending on Mom to depending on Justine.
    Justine, the novel's narrator, sees a photograph of her mother as a high school cheerleader and realizes, "there was a Mom before him, too -- someone happy and smiling, sitting in the air on top of another boy's shoulders, not even imagining there was such a thing as Dale in the world."
    Dale is the father of Rona. He is also someone with a perverted sense of religion. He punches Justine "in the back so hard that I had to go to the hospital for an ultrasound on my kidney" for not blessing a Popsicle before she ate it: "In this house, you thank the lord for every blessing you receive, period, the end."
    To make a better life -- which largely means getting away from Dale -- Colleen moves with her daughters to Massachusetts. On the way they stop in Salt Lake City (where Rosenfeld lives), and visit her sister. Colleen's capacity for combining naivety with mild sarcasm is demonstrated by what she tells her children to expect in Utah: "Mom had told us about Mormons on the way to Utah. It was a religion that couldn't drink coffee, Coke, or beer or smoke cigarettes; their mascot was the bee; and the men talked to God and then told the people who God wanted them to vote for, and not to be gay, and things like that."
    More than helping to define Mom, however, the passage is typical of the voice in which the novel is rendered. It's Justine speaking, and the reader can never be certain if she got her mother's remarks quite right. Like Huck Finn's, Justine's narrative borders on the unreliable. It is a technique that simultaneously requires the reader to read more carefully and gives depth to the narrator.

    Once they are in Massachusetts, the lives of all three -- Colleen, Justine, and Rona -- are far worse. They live with an old friend of Colleen's, Marie, who constantly criticizes Colleen. Justine enrolls in school and is treated meanly by some of the boys there. Among other things, they send her unsigned, sexually suggestive notes. Rona spends a lot of time sucking her thumb.

    Justine sums up her mother's relationships with men with a series of rhetorical questions: "If you wanted Mom to like you, you had to be more of a loser? You had to live in a dump and hate kids and not know how to make your own dinner, let alone anyone else's, and most of all, you had to be mean to Mom? Or if not exactly mean, everything you did had to make her look sort of like a sad, pathetic idiot? And you had to not call, because somehow the ones that didn't call were the ones she ended up liking the most."
    In school, Justine is given an assignment to write a pioneer diary, one that might have been written by someone in the 19th century moving from east to west. The diary she writes almost parallels what has happened to her and her sister and mother when they moved east. The husband dies, the baby is near death, a woman traveling with them does no work and consumes scarce food and water.
    The primary effect of the diary is to reveal just how desperate Justine feels trying to care for a manic-depressive mother and a little sister who displays some of the same tendencies as the mother.
    Justine is the hero of the novel. Colleen invites both our sympathy and our scorn. Rona is total vulnerability. Marie is helpful but unlikable. Dale is despicable. All the males, even the schoolboys, are nasty, except one (Ron, who Colleen rejects). But Justine is stronger than any 11-year-old should have to be. She's a role model for her mother. For all mothers.
   -----
    Martin Naparsteck reviews books from and about the West for The Salt Lake Tribune.