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It’s a rare thing indeed to reference another review in your own but in this case it’s pertinent because the charmingly appreciative words of Laline Paull, author of The Bees, are what convinced me, along with a whimsically bittersweet title, to buy Seni Glaister’s remarkably lovely first novel with bite, The Museum of Things Left Behind:

“Took me on holiday to the tiny imaginary country of Vallerosa, and returned me with with the wonderful feeling of having spent time with an uplifting time.”

It’s true that you could say that of many books; each, in their way, feels like a friend of sorts when you’re with them, rich with intriguing stories, wonderful personalities and beguiling insights, often so evocatively so that saying goodbye to them is enormously hard, almost a grief-stricken process.

But in the case of Glaister’s delightful book, that’s exactly what it feels like as Lizzie Holmesworth, newly-mistaken as a visiting member of British royalty, finds herself in a country which is almost Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in its quirkiness.

“‘We like to think of it as unique. It is called The Museum of Things Left Behind. You’d be amazed at what careless people abandon, like so much unwanted baggage. Come here! Look at this!’ He beckoned her towards the table on which he was leaning and swung round to show her its curiosities. There, pinned with tiny nails at each corner, were banknotes of all denominations and currencies, each one captured, preserved and displayed with the same love and attention that a butterfly collector might apply to his rarest species.” (P. 187)

Only Glaister has rather judiciously imbued the good citizens of Vallerosa, nestled in northern Italy near Austria, its buildings and arable land clinging to the edges of a gorge through which the river Floren flows for a scant eight kilometres, with enough self-awareness, intelligence and understanding of their place in the world that they are never at any point the laughing stock of the book.

Refreshingly, although there is undoubtedly much old-fashioned comedic potential in the idea of the wise, cultured outsider helping the backward souls of a neglected kingdom to come alive and realise their true mainstream potential, the arrival of Lizzie under entirely mistaken pretenses (theirs, not hers) is the catalyst for all kinds of mutually-beneficial epiphanies.

That these epiphanies are realised with much humour and some knowing social and political commentary adds to the rich enjoyment of a book that is light as air delightful but knowingly substantial in its insights on politics, humanity and the ways in which the arrival of someone or something new can spark real change if we’re open to it.

What we have in The Museum of Things Left Behind is the wonderful sense that all the things that transpire happen in the context of people simply getting to know one another.

There’s no grand denouement, no massive reveal that proves pivotal in the lives of all and sundry; simply the gentle and heartwarmingly real unspooling of all kinds of change and improvement that would likely never happened if Lizzie Holmesworth hadn’t happened to meet the good citizens of Vallerosa, from the President, Sergio Scorpioni to the Minister for Tourism Settimio Mosconi and humble but wily and insightful clockmaker Pavel, among the many appealingly idiosyncratic characters who make up the book.

They are an eccentric bunch in their own way but certainly not objects of ridicule, no more or less human and fallible than the rest of us and it’s a pleasure to read each and every page of this book precisely because everyone has worth and value and in many cases, amusing personalities.

“Lizzie pondered the question. She’d thought she had learned quite a lot, but now, put on the spot, she wasn’t sure she had. She knew that there was a complex political system that involved an unelected dictator, the sort she had been taught to fear, but since her whispered conversation with him [Sergio] in his bathroom and the many cups of tea they shared, she wasn’t sure he was that sort of dictator at all.” (P. 284)

The humour, laden with some pithy insights on all kinds of things, from the characters and they’re interactions with one another; there is a fair sense of the ridiculous yes, and there are gently hilarious scenes that unfold as a result, but at no point do you get the feeling that anyone is the butt of the joke.

The Americans possibly, with bluster and bombast that reflects palpable self-interest and an outdated paternalistic way of thinking, but even they escape as reasonably well-rounded characters who are just, in many ways, stupidly shortsighted.

The Museum of Things Left Behind is in many ways that charming book you need when the world seems to be falling apart around you – like right now perhaps?

It’s multifaceted, warm-and-fuzzy happy ending is the stuff of political and societal fantasies, an all-too-rare coming together where everyone learns a little something about life and is all the better for it.

It’s a reassuring reminder that contrary to all current indications to the contrary, and they are there in lamentably multitudinous abundance, people are capable of seeing each other’s point of view, learning from each other and growing.

If that sounds all a little too neatly tied up with a rose-coloured bow, well perhaps it is, but I adored each and every moment of a book that celebrates the very best of us as a collective species, imbuing its humorously clever tale with richly-woven tales, intelligent comedy that is happy to be as silly as it can at times, to always rewarding effect, and a wonderful sense that maybe we are closer to each other in sensibility, ambitions and hopes and dream that we realise.

In this ever-more mobile digital age, where job tenure is fleeting, geographic locales are a home but for a moment, and social ties fray and fasten at the speed of tweet, we remain, as a species, heavily-dependent on a sense of place for our sense of identity.

Even when we move, without a second thought, from our childhood home to a place of study and then onto various towns and cities, and these days, countries, we will often refer back to a hometown or a place we most feel like we belonged, an anchor point in the benign turbulence that is our lives.

It’s not necessarily a repudiation of where we are now, and where we have been or wish to go; simply a recognition that this place most heavily shaped who we are and what we became and remains the focal point for our life’s journey upon which everything else pivots, like it or not.

For Maya Suleman, an immigrant in her college years from Ukraine who married Alex Rubin, a New Yorker who emigrated from Minsk, Belarus when he was 8, the much-adored son of Eugene and Raisa, and stayed in America to forge a life, and raise an adopted son Max, whose troubles kick the narrative of Boris Fishman’s second novel, Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo, into high gear, questions of identity and place are merely academic or a thing for idle musing anymore.

They become, in a very real sense, a matter of existential life and death when she sets out with a reluctant husband and son in tow, for Montana, to see if she can find out why it is that Max keeps running away, keeps eating grass and floating face down in rivers to stare at fish.

She is convinced, to the very depths of her unsettled, neurotic soul, one that has barely ventured in thought or actuality from her home in New Jersey, that Max will find peace if she can just get back to the state from which he was adopted, see his birth parents one more time and interrogate them on what will make her son happy.

“Frank’s eyebrows, of the same gray bristly mix as his beard, slunk together. ‘All right, now,’ he said. ‘Take it easy.’ The night shift regularly put him in acquaintance with the glitches and flaws of human design, but Maya didn’t seem crazy, only despondent. She nodded vacantly, grateful not to be dismissed so far from home, and turned back to her seat.” (P. 55)

What she’s really asking, and this is only something that comes to light in this beautifully-written, richly-wrought novel that deftly brings together emotionally-evocative drama and idiosyncratic humour to powerful effect, when Maya is on the road in Montana, is who she is.

Projecting everything onto her son, who it emerges is actually reasonably secure in his sense of self, and takes life as it comes in common with most children, she externalises the roiling, restive energy that drives her onwards, ever onwards, a lack of peace that sees her unable to truly settle or relax and which indelibly imprints on her fractious marriage or sometimes-troubled son.

The common denominator for the family, for all its ups and downs, its peaks and valleys, is Maya who has never quite found her groove in a society she loves but always feels somewhat of an impostor in.

What she discovers when she finally hits the road and leaves the suffocating smallness of New Jersey and her in-laws behind – she loves them but they have sculpted a small world buttressed by superstition and old world perspective but also humour-laden and flawed certainty of what the new world is like – is that it is she who isn’t at home, who is yearning for something else, for the other, an unspoken need to realise who she is and make something of that.

As an exercise in identity discovery and true understanding of sense of self, Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo is a delight.

It straddles the serious and the absurd, the deep and the eccentrically and humourously shallow with ease, offering up a portrait of one person’s life, and that of the people in uneasy satellite around her, that you find yourself happily and thoughtfully lost in.

Fishman slowly but surely unravels the real cause of Maya’s slowly-burbling distress, and the way in which it disguises itself, or it is allowed to be disguised by the one-time would-be cook and cafe owner, taking us on a journey that is as surprising for the protagonist as it is for us.

What seems like a simple, if emotionally-complicated and questionable, exercise in re-acquainting themselves with the birth parents Max doesn’t even know exist – he hasn’t been told he is adopted yet, a decision forged in a myriad conflicting desires and issues clung to uneasily by the Rubin family – becomes so much more as Maya discovers that she is the root of her family’s topsy-turvy world, and quite possibly, the source of her son’s inability to fully settle down.

“Maya colored, feeling the interloper’s familiar cluelessness. It, not Alex, was her true life’s companion. Just when she began to get free of the feeling, she mispronounced a word or failed to apprehend some invisible rule, and lived the nest days like a guest, a cherry pit of self-reproach in her stomach. How was one to know these things?” P. 211)

At times Fishman’s narrative just jump around in both sequence and intent, leaving you as befuddled as Maya often feels, but by and large, this is a wryly-clever and sensitive novel that explores what it is like to exist in a weird limbo where you are simultaneously at home and not, all at once.

If you have ever felt a niggling sense that you’re a little too square peg-ish for that round hole you should, in theory, find permanently and wonderfully invitingly comfortable, Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo will speak to you, echoing what it is like for anyone, but particularly immigrants or anyone who has uprooted themselves from a world they know intimately and well to one they almost do but not quite, to realise they haven’t quite reached a perfect accommodation with their new life.

Perhaps none of us really do, something Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo more than hints at with its narratively-uncertain resolution that nevertheless find some sense of peace for its restive main inhabitant, all of us forever perched between contentment and an impelling need to find that elusive something that will complete us and leave us feeling, in our minds at least, more at ease with who we are and in the case of Fishman’s fascinatingly real characters, where we are.