Love is a Rebellious Bird

Who is it we love and why do we love these people? Toward the end of her life, Judith asks these questions, trying to understand why she chose Elliot Pine to love. Why, for sixty years, did she persist in loving someone who never gave as much as he was given? In her quest for understanding, she writes her story to this exceptional man. Meeting as children in Chicago, they move to opposite coasts. Elliot embarks on a remarkable legal career in Washington and New York while Judith raises her children alone in California, after tragedy. Coming together again and again throughout their lives, their love is never equal, Elliot defining the terms of the relationship.

Judith examines the role of Beauty in love, for Elliot’s face and form were beautiful. She considers the role of Consolation, how they supported one another in devastating times. Insanity, Magic, Deceit, Sensory Fulfillment, and, finally, Being Seen―Judith looks at these many aspects of her love.

Her feelings for this man cost her, impinged on every other relationship in her life: friends, her two husbands, even her three children. After sixty years, however, it all changes. Judith makes one more profound sacrifice, finally achieving a sort of long-awaited happiness in her love.

Author: Elayne Klasson

Publication Date: November 12, 2019

Categories: Audiobooks, Award-Winning, Fall 2019, Fiction

Description
About the Author

Description

2020 National Indie Excellence Awards Finalist in New Fiction
2020 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist in Best Cover Design (Fiction)
2020 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist in General Fiction/Novel (Over 80k Words)
2019 Best Book Awards Finalist in Best New Fiction
2019 National Jewish Book Awards Finalist in Debut Fiction
2019 Sarton Women’s Book Awards Finalist in Contemporary Fiction

“Klasson fills every scene she can with thought-provoking reflections on the nature of love, family, and romance. A surprisingly complex and realistic love story delicately narrated by an endearing protagonist.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Elayne Klasson’s artistic and compassionate novel Love is a Rebellious Bird focuses on a lifelong love affair. . . an operatic, enduring, and subtle romance.”
—Foreword Reviews

“A deeply touching story that moves deftly through the decades to a sweet and graceful finale.”
—Carl Alasko, PhD, author of Beyond Blame and Emotional Bullshit

“A beautifully written tale of enduring love by a master storyteller.”
—Jill G. Hall, author of The Black Velvet Coat and The Silver Shoes

“Elayne Klasson has written a novel that is both very real and very brave. Her character, Judith, begins the story in her seventies, looking back, but the words are not written to us. She’s writing to Elliot, a man she has loved all her life, though both of them have married others. ‘For me it was always you, Elliot.’ It’s bold for the protagonist to deliver her story to ‘you, Elliot,’ as she covers their history from teenage to old age, and it works, as we move through a life of learning, teaching, mothering, and wild passions. The last chapters are as surprising as they are tender. I was captured.”
—Gerald DiPego, author of Keeper of the City and Cheevey

“Love is a Rebellious Bird vividly evokes the worlds of Judith Sherman and Elliott Pine: 1950s Chicago in the Jewish neighborhood of West Rogers Park, the subsequent whiplash of the liberated ’60s, marriages that fail and marriages that thrive, losses from illness and ambitions denied. Klasson shows us the seismic repercussions of a love, more unequal than unrequited, that vibrate over a lifetime. While Elliott may never fully love Judith in the way she deserves, the reader certainly will.”
—Stacy Swann, author of the forthcoming novel Olympus, TX and contributing editor at American Short Fiction

“In her testimony to the strength of enduring love, Elayne Klasson captures an abiding affection that transcends time and place, that is never maudlin but looks at what is gained and sometimes lost in a friendship that is full of the best of human nature.”
—Dr. Mashey Bernstein, Professor of Writing, University of California, Santa Barbara

About the Author

Elayne grew up on the Northside of Chicago. She went to university and graduate school in the Midwest―Ohio State University and the University of Michigan where she earned a Masters of Public Health and then a PhD in Psychology. She lived in Barbados, West Indies, working as a health care consultant with Project Hope in the Caribbean; then, several decades later, returning as a writer and columnist for the Barbados Daily Nation. Her professional career has largely been in academia at San Jose State University, with her research and clinical area of expertise being the severely mentally ill. A recent transplant to the Santa Ynez Valley, near Santa Barbara, she is a popular lifestyle newspaper columnist there. Elayne has also appeared on San Francisco public television as a restaurant critic. She’s been awarded several writer’s residencies, including Hedgebrook Writer’s Colony on Whidbey Island, Washington and Villa Montalvo in Saratoga, California. She daily walks her young dachshund and aged fluffy white rescue through nearby vineyards. She is married to David, a scientist. Between them have five children, all grown.