Now an Amazon best seller!
Love is a Rebellious Bird has been selected as a Finalist for:
National Indie Excellence Award Finalist in New Fiction
2020 Next Generation Indie Book Awards: General Fiction Finalist AND Best Cover Design Finalist
“Best New Fiction” from the American BookFest 2019 Best Book Awards
The Goldberg Prize for debut fiction from the National Jewish Book Awards
The 2019 Sarton Women's Book Awards
“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
Clarion Rating: 5 out of 5
“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 the way she deserves, the reader certainly will.”
— Stacey Swann, author of Olympus, TX (forthcoming from Doubleday in 2021) 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 was gained and sometimes lost in a friendship that is full of the best of human nature.”
— Mashey Bernstein, Ph.D, Professor of Writing, University of California Santa Barbara
Why do we love the people we love?
This tale of a sixty-year love affair examines the age-old question of why we love the people we do. A beautiful, charismatic and wildly successful man is adored by a woman. Even as children, he held the power. Though bound by tragedy and friendship, he defines the terms of their relationship, until finally, in old age, the power shifts.