Massachusetts, California, Timbuktu

Rating:
Summary: Riveting, Simply Wonderful
Review: An intriguing and innovative novel. Rosenfeld is quite simply a brilliant writer. A great read.

Rating:
Summary: Mom is crazy
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Mom is crazy
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Wow!
Review: Definitely a great book to read - one you won't want to put down.

Rating:
Summary: A wonderful, engaging mother-daughter story packed w/ spirit
Review: First, the writing is brilliant. Rosenfeld is so skillful at capturing the voice of a 12-year-old girl at the edge of the cliff called adolescence, that it feels almost autobiographical. Many readers may feel she is telling their story.

Second, the plot is heartwrenching, with the sadness tempered by humor. Readers can't help but root for Justine as they laugh and cry with her. The diary is an ingenious plot device that adds another dimension to the main story.

This book brought me back to my own childhood, and I could not put it down even when the tears began to flow. This is a *much* better story than The Center of Everything, which is due out later this summer. I hope word of mouth brings Rosenfeld the audience she so deserves. Go Justine!

Rating:
Summary: Mom is crazy
Review: I just finished reading this for my book group. Massachusetts, California, Timbuktu is sad, funny, demanding and rewarding. Hard to put down - harder to forget.

Rating:
Summary: Intimate and Intense
Review: I just finished reading this for my book group. Massachusetts, California, Timbuktu is sad, funny, demanding and rewarding. Hard to put down - harder to forget.

Rating:
Summary: loved it from first to lastpage
Review: 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......

Rating:
Summary: Powerful and Poignant
Review: 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!

Rating:
Summary: This story will take your emotions on an unforgettable ride
Review: It can be risky to pick up a book like this. First you wonder how a book that is written from the perspective of a 12-year-old can keep you interested for 388 pages. Then, as you begin reading, you discover that there are so many asides and back story detours that you wonder if there is actually a plot. Then around page 20 it becomes a book you can't put down.

Justine Hanley will do for female adolescents what Holden Caulfield did for teenage boys back in the fifties. She reveals the thoughts and insights of a precocious mind as she struggles to understand the "Mystery of Mom." And how she expresses herself! Either the author is now 12 years old or she enjoys total recall, with the ability to notice and remember even the smallest impressions and details of her young life with humor and sensitivity.

At one point, Justine wishes she could tell the "Secret of Mom" to Ron, a guy who really likes Colleen and is the first decent man that she and her little sister, Rona, have ever met. She would like him to stick around but knows that she cannot tell him: "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."

When Justine describes her sadness she says, "Sadness and I were the same thing. I was the owner of all the sadness everywhere, and the meaning of it, too. If anyone wanted to know anything about sad, or if they wanted any for themselves, they'd have to come to me." It makes you want to find this kid and hug her until she gets relief. Despite these feelings, she never falters in caring for her mother and little sister, continuously giving what she herself seldom perceives she gets.

Yet, through all the anxieties, sadness and fears, the bright hope of a wise yet naïve little girl with her keen observations brings smile after smile and some laughs out loud to the reader. She notices, "The way we usually got a boyfriend was that Mom would meet someone somewhere for about one second...and she'd get him to write down his address, then we would send him an application."

As a 12-year-old, Justine can merely describe and react to Colleen because she doesn't have the tools to name the "mystery" that drives her mother. She can only observe the signs that precede a variety of bizarre behaviors, behaviors that put her children in harm's way and create havoc in the lives of those around her. If Justine had the tools, she would realize that the "Mystery of Mom" is, in reality, an undiagnosed mental illness known as Bipolar Disorder. It is a dangerous disease that can cut a swath of destruction through families, friends and employers. The good news is that it is treatable. And with treatment and medication, people like Colleen can become more responsible, productive and safe.

Unfortunately, too many people like Justine and her family will indulge the illness and enable the individual to continue their destructive behaviors with impunity. Today, there are many support groups, books and web sites designed to help the victims of Bipolar Disorder and their victims.

MASSACHUSETTS, CALIFORNIA, TIMBUKTU will take your emotions on an unforgettable ride and could encourage you to take a much closer look at the people around you.

--- Reviewed by Maggie Harding