Massachusetts, California, Timbuktu

by Stephanie Rosenfeld

Book Overview

After mother and daughters hit the road, Justine desperately tries to navigate the changing terrain of home, family, and adolescence, as Colleen slips further into despondency. Forced to take over all... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0345448251
• ISBN13: 9780345448255
• Release Date: April 2003
• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Length: 388 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.8" x 1.5" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

Just whose story is being told?

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.

Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful

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!

loved it from first to lastpage

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......

Mom is crazy

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 o

Completely Satisfying

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.