Chaucer’s Books, 3321 State St., Santa Barbara, will host local writer Elayne Klasson, author of “The Earthquake Child,” for a book talk and signing, 6 p.m. Thursday, July 6.

“The Earthquake Child” is the story of an adoption, told through the voices of an adoptee, his desperate young birth mother, and his loving but grieving adoptive mother.

How can Joshua’s behavior be explained? This question is all-consuming for his adoptive family. Joshua was relinquished at birth, then adopted only days later.

Is it his genetic inheritance of substance abuse and generational poverty that causes him to act out, run away and eventually become involved with drugs? Is it the losses he’s experienced in his adoptive family?

Or is it the very fact of adoption itself — the trauma of being separated from his gestational mother to be raised by a family unrelated to him by blood, culture, or biology?

Klasson’s background includes a career of scholastic achievements, contributions to society and bold moves, to her rise as a writer to successful newspaper columnist.

Her debut novel “Love is a Rebellious Bird” was her first to be published with She Writes Press.

Klasson grew up on Chicago’s Northside. She attended university and graduate school at Ohio State University and the University of Michigan, earning a masters of public health, then a Ph.D in psychology.

Living in Barbados, West Indies, for a number of years, she worked first as a health care consultant with Project Hope in the Caribbean; then, several decades later, returned as a writer and columnist for the Barbados Daily Nation.

She lives in the Santa Ynez Valley, where she is a lifestyle newspaper columnist there.

For more, visit https://www.elayneklasson.com/about.