Customer Reviews

Massachusetts, California, Timbuktu

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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!

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......

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.

By the time readers have finished Stephanie Rosenfeld's compelling debut novel, they will have felt the same emotional exhaustion its intrepid twelve-year-old protagonist experienced as she accompanied her harried, depressed and neglectful mother on an ill-planned cross country journey. "Massachusetts, California, Timbuktu" is not for the weak at heart. It is an unrelentingly depressing book, marked by emotional abuse, emotional abandonment and surreal parenting. Written through the perspective of the strong-hearted Justine, "Massachusetts" somehow finds a sense of ironic humor and unconquerable hope as Justine alternately takes care of her endearing younger sister and her maddeningly pathetic mother.

The paperback version of the novel includes an interview with the author, who believes that Colleen is a "good mother." Despite the fact that Colleen is escaping an abusive relationship, nothing could be farther from the truth. She is a horrible parent, so oblivious to her children's suffering that she refuses to (or is unable to) provide shelter, clothes, schooling and food for her children. As if this physical neglect isn't bad enough, her children are given the privilege of witnessing delusional, self-destructive behaviors that should have had some public authority commit Colleen to an institution and place her two daughters in homes which provide a modicum of stability, protection and love.

Aware only that she does not have a father and that her hippy-like mother is serially involved with seemingly every loser on the planet, Justine longs for her own narrative, her own coherent understanding of life. Justine describes her mother as a "human eraser," more like "an alien who just couldn't figure out the puzzle of human life." Colleen never does get the idea of adult responsibility: "Mom had a way of taking facts and mushing them into a kind of paste of feelings." Having an incompetent mother compels Justine to wrestle with some serious existential questions, and it is not surprising that the child develops an absurdist view of life. All this is done while the twelve-year-old becomes the mother and the mother becomes the dependent child. Justine even develops a color-coded system for remembering things Colleen tells her not to forget. "Red was for things no one could really do, but I wrote them down anyway." An example of this would be when Colleen insists that Justine "remind her never to sacrifice her self-esteem to such an abusive jerk!"

Rosenfeld takes us on a cross-country trek with Justine as her mother tries to make gold from straw and her younger sister receives solace from television sets that show only snow. The children feast on such delicacies as lint-covered chocolate mints salvaged from seat cushions and live in accommodations that crack-addicts would eschew. Along the way, Colleen alienates friends and family from coast to coast, descending into clinical depression that immobilizes her. All this occurs as Justine develops breasts, discovers prepubescent boys are idiotic jerks and tries to find ways to keep her mind alive despite sporadic and inadequate schooling.

Only the most obtuse reader could not discern the protagonist's inner voice, but the author inexplicably interweaves Justine's invented pioneer diary to show us what Justine is feeling. Initially welcomed, the diary's passages become longer and more frequent throughout the novel. The diary becomes increasingly intrusive while providing minimal insight. Additionally, a more judicious editing of the book would have increased its impact. Three hundred and fifty pages is more than sufficient to describe a loser mother and her valiant oldest daughter. Justine is wise enough to understand that her mother will never improve.

"Massachusetts, California, Timbuktu" shows Stephanie Rosenfeld's promise. There is a flinty integrity to her writing, and her unflinching examination of family disintegration and parental indifference shows she is unafraid to tackle serious issues. Despite its flaws, this is a satisfying novel.

This is a story of an emotionally crippled single mother looking for love in all the wrong places. Her 12 year old daughter becomes the grown-up as the mother takes them on a journey across the United States in search of a relationship that doesn't exist anymore. This woman is completely unable to have any kind of healthy relationship with anyone including her "best friend" and her two daughters. As the book unfolds I start relating more and more to the mother, as I know a few people just like her. Throughout the whole book I was hoping she would get her act together and start being a mother for her two daughters.

This was one of the best books I have read in a very long time. I laughed and then I cried and then I laughed again. Ms. Rosenfeld is a genius with words and word pictures. I could not put this book down. I want to adopt Justine and Rona. At times I wanted to strangle their mother and then at other times I would have so much compassion for her. This was a great read and a great journey!

I turned the last page and went right back to the beginning and started reading it again.

This story is deeper than some people seem to think in some of these reviews. On the surface, you have an interesting story of a woman unable to cope & her preteen daughter struggling to keep it together. But underneath that, you have the story of a small child (the little sister) and the traumatizing effect her mother has on her; you have the coming of age story of Justine; you have the complex story of a woman unable to cope, grow up, and get out of a cycle of depression and selfish gratification; you also have the story of how other adults try to handle the self-destructive behavior of their sister/daughter/or friend.
It is a beautifully written novel, the language original & poetic. The journal Justine has to write for her teacher turns out to be quite beautiful.

In this wonderful novel, this gifted author gives readers a powerful and poignant mother-daughter story-one with the appeal of Mona Simpson's Anywhere But Here and the heartbreak of Judith Guest's Ordinary People. I didn't want this book to end!

Readers fortunate enough to have stumbled upon Rosenfeld's previous collection of shorts (What about the Love Part?), will find even more good fortune in just one run-through of Massachusetts California, Timbuktu, a completely satisfying debut novel which spotlights the life and times (and travails) of the talented author's 12-year-old main character, Justine Hanley.

Rosenfeld's cross-country year with Justine includes an unforgettable conjoin with six-year-old sister Rona and a middle-of-the-vortex experience with the girls' mother Colleen, who drags her offspring from one city to the next in search of adventure and the next new love.

Thrust into an earlier-than-necessary role as caretaker, Justine attempts to work through her insubordinate angst by journeling everything she sees and feels.

Rosenfeld's tale glimmers with an appreciative passion for life's subtle and ordinary moments, a funny, poignant nod to the inherent treachery of adolescence and the amazing resilience of the human will to victor over every single hurdle along the path to the race's reward at destination's end.

The author allows us to feel for and with the characters. I could not put this book down.

In this wonderful novel, this gifted author gives readers a powerful and poignant mother-daughter story-one with the appeal of Mona Simpson's Anywhere But Here and the heartbreak of Judith Guest's Ordinary People. I didn't want this book to end!