Love Is a Rebellious Bird

by Elayne Klasson

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631526046
Publisher:	She Writes Press
Publication date:	11/12/2019
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	494,166
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.20(d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher

2019-09-06
A debut novel follows a girl's crush as it evolves into a lifelong tale of obsession and passion.

Judith first met Elliot as a fifth grader who had recently moved to Chicago's North Side in the mid-1950s. Then, he was just a little boy with torn trousers, but over the course of the next 60 years, Elliot would become Judith's lover, friend, and permanent addiction. "Our relationship was a cocktail mix of rivalry and loyalty—shaken with a strong dose of passion and resentment," Judith writes of their time as academically competitive sixth graders, which would set the tone for the decades to come. Following the suicide of Elliot's mother, Judith consoles him while being overjoyed at their relationship's shift into teenage romance, but college abruptly ends her dreams of a happily-ever-after. Instead, they pursue different paths, with Elliot transforming into a high-powered New York attorney and Judith becoming a divorced social worker in California. Through letters and cross-country trips, they remain in each other's lives. But Judith always follows their unsaid agreement that she not talk about her love for him. Throughout children, divorces, and even deaths, Klasson brings the two characters together again and again with the same devastating result for Judith, who never gives up on the "man by which I had measured all other loves." Written in the first person and addressed directly to Elliot, the novel's prose is strikingly elegant and intimate. What could easily slide into a melodramatic tale of long-lost love turns into a realistic and psychological study of one woman's deepest thoughts. The author also cleverly develops supporting characters through Judith's eyes. (Judith's eventual friendship with Elliot's second wife and her reactions to Seth, her philandering first husband, are easily some of the narrative's most memorable and captivating moments.) While the pace of the book's second half slows down considerably as the two lovers move into old age and toward the bittersweet conclusion of their long journey, 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

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