Jump to ratings and reviews
Rate this book

Love Is One of the Choices

Rate this book
WHEN YOU'RE NEITHER A GIRL NOR A WOMAN...

Maggie and Caroline are both seniors in high school and suddenly everything that seemed simple has become complicated. Thinking about sex, wondering about college, planning for careers -- there are so many choices.

Maggie is brilliant and very self-assured. She considers herself a feminist -- until she meets Todd Lamport who challenges everything she's ever believed in and draws her into a special love affair. Suddenly independence doesn't seem the only way of life...

Caroline has never thought much of herself. She's shy, withdrawn -- and secretly in love with her chemistry teacher, Justin Prager. When he unexpectedly returns her feelings, she is thrown into emotional turmoil.

Norma Klein's wonderful novel explores the lives of these very different women -- and proves that no matter what we think we want from life, love is always one of the choices....

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

402 people want to read

About the author

Norma Klein

70 books112 followers
Norma Klein was born in New York City and graduated cum laude and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa from Barnard College with a degree in Russian. She later received her master's degree in Slavic languages from Columbia University.

Ms. Klein began publishing short stories while attending Barnard and since then she had written novels for readers of all ages. The author got her ideas from everyday life and advised would-be writers to do the same -- to write about their experiences or things they really care about.

Ms. Klein died in 1989.

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think?
Rate this book

Friends & Following

Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!

Community Reviews

5 stars
79 (30%)
4 stars
74 (28%)
3 stars
77 (30%)
2 stars
23 (8%)
1 star
3 (1%)
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
Profile Image for elita.
67 reviews26 followers
August 25, 2007
Like Judy Blume, but better. I was obsessed with Norma Klein in middle school and when I heard she had died I was devastated.
Profile Image for Heather.
7 reviews1 follower
October 12, 2007
my mother was constantly trying her best to protect me from naughty things. In second grade she wouldn't let me see Who Framed Roger Rabbit, because Jessica Rabbit was too sexy. I was supposed to only read kids books or books appropriate for my age, but if it was a classic it was ok. And if you have ever read any of the classics...

Anyhow, sometime in Junior High I was milling around the young adult/adult section of the Mitchell Park Library in Palo Alto, I forget which section, and I found this book.

I would say depending on your view it's for more mature readers, but different people can handle different things. It deals frankly with sex, suicide, and learning to make choices about ones life. The main characters are two friends who are 18 and about to graduate high school. It's an excellent book and I recently bought a copy that had been pulled from a Library's collection and is a first edition from ABEbooks.com which is an awesome resource for hard to find books. And I am enjoying it just as much as I did when I first read it. Of course I can relate to the issues in the book

a quick blurb from the 1987 edition "Senior year in high school brings emotional turmoil, sexual awakening, and some painful decisions for Maggie and Caroline; one an ardent feminist and the other a shy dreamer in a fantasy world."

It is also a banned book. Love is one of the Choices, by Norma Klein. Removed from Evergreen School
District, Vancouver, Washington, 1983.


it's dated having been written in 1978. I doubt many young women today when thinking of birth control turn to a diaphragm or that traditional Freudian psychologist are common, and when was the last time it was common for pornography to be shown in movie theaters? Aside from the things that obvious date the novel, it is excellent and the threads about coming of age that flow through this book can still touch ages to come. Go read it. Have fun, and support banned books!
Profile Image for Lana Del Slay.
202 reviews19 followers
May 13, 2012
This book. This book.

I've had my fair share of [cough] emotional entanglements. While I never had an affair with a teacher, b'god I had the crush that wouldn't die. Because I was a bookworm with very few girlfriends my own age, I ate up All The Novels on the subject in an attempt to understand what was going on.

The thing about mostly All The Novels was that I kept getting hit upside the head with tropes. If it didn't end very badly for the girl, then she immediately formed an attachment to a boy her own age, with little examination as to why an older man would appeal to her in the first place. Daddy issues? The classic "safe first crush"? I always came away confused because none of it resonated. I formed attachments to boys my own age. They never lasted for some reason. I wasn't looking for a daddy, and my first crush was on a neighborhood boy.

And none of the voices felt at all authentic... until Norma Klein's.

Klein's examination of teenage sexuality cleansed my palate after years of message novels. Finally, the notion of a young woman choosing sex! With a partner she liked, even! I had resented for years the idea that if I lost my virginity in high school, I'd be going along to get along, or possibly raped outright. Where was the adolescent girl's sexual agency? Society had long since accepted that of adolescent boys; how were girls different?

The answer germinating inside me was "they're not". And Klein knew it, too. Revolutionary for a writer of YA well prior to the Twilight explosion. She treated her young adult protagonists as young adults, not overly-tall children. Their decisions had consequences, but they were allowed to face those consequences instead of running for the shelter of the nearest sympathetic authority figure.

I respected Maggie and Caroline. I thought Caroline was a bit of an idiot for taking up with a married man, but I admired her for owning her role in the relationship. Society would not have blamed her had she retreated to a position of "little girl lost". She didn't. She claimed her ground, the ground I fought for as a baby feminist: the right to make her own damn mistakes. She was, in other words, allowed to grow up, so that her childhood did not extend into her twenties as childhood does now.

Klein, through Caroline, gave me hope that reality was more nuanced than a message novel.

Note please that I also remember Caroline as being a stronger, healthier protagonist than most of the girls of post-Twilight YA. Despite her love interest's dual status as "married" and "her teacher", I'd argue that he was still better than a lot of the bad boy characters in paranormals now. The gender dynamic in general was healthier than the one Generation Y/beyond has internalised. Was I once a girl in unrequited love with an inappropriate man? Yes, but he never treated me half as shabbily as what these bad boys get away with. I learned from my experience that a good man would show me respect regardless of my sexual availability, and that I couldn't drive him away by being myself. That's rare in fiction nowadays, and yet that rarity is perfectly acceptable to the adults who are writing it, unwittingly holding it up as the ideal for the target audience.

I don't trust the ideal, and I seriously wonder what's going on inside those authors' heads. What taught them, I wonder, the values they have written?



Addendum May 2011:

It's a real comedown to reread something ten years after I first read it, especially now that I understand more of it.

I ordered Love Is One of the Choices because it was so memorable to me at sixteen. (Guessing. I may have been younger and curious. But it's been at least ten years.) I think that was because I already had a penchant for equal relationships between theoretically unequal people, and I probably owe you words on Gor and queering/feministing the text.

Is feministing a word and not just a website?

But I wasn't as keenly aware of the difference between womanhood then and womanhood now. "Then" is the 1970s, when girls used diaphragms and IUDs, the halcyon days of second-wave feminism. I suppose when I first read this book, I was still so slavishly devoted to the second-wave writers that I couldn't fathom any other sort of feminism making sense to me.

Oh, I still applaud Klein's ability to write a nuanced story about real people. I don't think anyone's made of cardboard, necessarily, not on purpose. I think Maggie's written as an extreme for a reason, and Klein does provide discussion of why Maggie is the way she is. At the same time, knowing what happened to women like Maggie as they embraced the second wave, I have a little more hope for Caroline, who isn't nearly as rigid in her worldview. Caroline is softer, more able to move with her circumstances. She loves like I love. She thinks of Justin the way I sometimes think of Darling, that I'm the envy of every woman in the room and how could they not be falling all over him?

Caroline is finding her own wave. She really isn't as dogmatic as Maggie, and several characters call Maggie out on this in the course of the novel. That they're all men sits badly with me; at the same time, I wonder if this is authorial intent at work or just coincidence. Are we meant to wonder about Justin and Todd's motivations? Absolutely nothing is clear in the text. I love Klein for that. She doesn't slam us with moral absolutes. Maybe the decade was more forgiving in that respect. Maybe she just wasn't interested in Aesops.

Did I, at the time, identify better with childfree, driven Maggie? Or did I find myself better reflected in Caroline? I do like Caroline better now, even if I think she's a bit... "naïve" was originally the adjective. That makes me as dogmatic as Maggie, though. Caroline is Caroline. She's straight, she's monogamous, and having married her lover, she is ready to experience motherhood. I almost see her as a proto-Eve Casson minus the carefree nature. Caroline is more intense than Maggie in certain ways. She loves jealously, would be devastated if Justin ever attempted to open their marriage as he and first wife Ariella did. She loves his six-year-old son as if he were her own. Perhaps she'll ease up with time. When I was eighteen, I was pretty intense myself. Living that way takes its toll. I find it easier now to roll with life, take it as it comes, and accept that "to everything there is a season".

(Some wisdom ages very well.)

Could be in ten years the four main characters will have formed a polyamorous quad, an OT4 in fannish terms. One true foursome. Especially in the final two chapters, we see how well each woman suits each man and vice versa; the opening of their relationships just to these trusted friends is more plausible than the way Ariella wanted, where she and Justin could have anyone they liked. Or, and this is equally as plausible given the text, Caroline will have sunk so low in Maggie's estimation that any friendship they once shared will have faded into a childhood fancy. Maggie is already dismissing Caroline in a way that would shock me if I were Caroline. Maggie's dogma may get run over by her karma as she adopts and internalizes masculine attributes, dismissing femininity as lesser -- not at all a feminist attitude! Not anymore, anyhow.

This is how we got the workaholics, the career/life balance issues, Friedan's own later writings (which, at eighteen, read like Stephen King, but scarier). When equality really means "I'm a man in a woman suit", is it really equality? Especially if the woman in a woman suit remains devalued as a result? I wouldn't have thought to ask those questions during my first reading of this book. I don't want children. I could take or leave a career, so long as the only person upon whom I depend financially is myself. If some of my traits coincide with those now found in men, fine, but it's not on purpose and it's not what I want. Maggie is a letdown in that respect. Unwilling to entertain notions that allow for emotional attachment, she's almost certainly the character headed for a midlife crisis. We need to bend so we don't break. Caroline bends. She looks weaker compared to Maggie; actually, she's strong the way a willow is strong, able to blow in the wind and not snap. Not brittle at all. She'll grow into understanding the world. What she knows at an early age will serve her far better.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Profile Image for Morgan Schulman.
1,295 reviews47 followers
January 7, 2013
These amazing books are kind of like 70s feminist trash... Every single Norma Klein protagonist lives on the UWS, has jazz musicians on "grass" for parents, and is sleeping with multiple 50 yo men, usually their teachers or their best friend's dads, and always have multiple vaginal orgasms. This one is the eponymous Klein.
Profile Image for Amber.
486 reviews56 followers
June 18, 2016
I read about Norma Klein a few years ago on Jezebel. She is a YA novelist in the same vein as Judy Blume but is no where near as well known. After finally having read one of her books, I'm not sure why this is the case.

This book is pretty timeless; you could easily adapt it to a film and market it to young ladies. It tackles major issues in an honest, smart way that not a lot of books do. It doesn't just talk about sex, it talks about sex in conjunction with your values and expectations and it maybe not quite fitting in with either. It talks about abortion without it being the whole story. It's self-sacrifice vs independence in a thoughtful way that's really refreshing in a world where 'Twilight' is the gold standard for the kids. The one thing 'Love' has in common with the Twilight saga is that they both venture beyond the point where the protagonists get married or settled or whatever and examines what happens after.
Profile Image for Jenn N.
213 reviews
November 14, 2018
Woah. I was blown away by this book. Despite being written in the late 70s, it’s frank discussions of sex, life choices and the bridge to adulthood are presented here in a way I don’t see in today’s YA.
Profile Image for Kelly.
Author 6 books1,221 followers
Read
June 25, 2019
I am really beginning to wonder how people who LOVED all of Klein's work would feel upon a reread. I 100% get the appeal and think there is some real great stuff in here that was groundbreaking at the time, but I also feel like there's a heck of a lot to cringe about and to really dig into. The adults are the real messes in these books, which feels like a commentary on how teens PERCEIVE adults, but also, they're real messes besides.

Maggie and Carrie were some interesting best friends, and this book has no ending.
Profile Image for Annabelle.
1,191 reviews22 followers
January 31, 2022
This is a book about choices. And how, even in high school, one can make devastatingly life-altering choices. Unlike Norma Klein's New York teenagers, her characters here adhere more to my idea of the American teenager. This story reminds me of the movie Mystic Pizza, for its student-professor romance.
Profile Image for V.J. Allison.
Author 10 books91 followers
November 3, 2017
I read this book when I was about fourteen or fifteen, and I remember how shocked I was to see sex in a teen romance. Normally first love books are so innocent, or the ones I read were.

I recently purchased a hard copy of the book because I loved Norma Klein's work when I was a teenager, and I lost most of them sometime while moving.

It's good, but not as good as I remember. Maybe I'm more jaded now being an adult, and an erotic romance author?

There are funny moments... .

Overall it's not a bad read, even if it is dated - it was originally published in 1978. If you were a fan of Ms. Klein's years ago, it's a nice trip down memory lane.
Profile Image for Maria  Almaguer .
1,398 reviews7 followers
July 3, 2023
A nostalgia read, Norma Klein was one of my favorite authors as a teenager. It's a very progressive and forward thinking novel about two teenage girlfriends and their new romantic and sexual relationships. Themes include premarital sex, abortion, suicide, friendship, and coming of age. It's mostly dialogue which is at times stilted, but I think it's just a different era. No computers or smart phones so it seems like it's a much simpler time, though the social issues remain the same.
Profile Image for Kidlitter.
1,448 reviews17 followers
September 8, 2024
Stars for Klein as always giving women - and young adults at that - the serious consideration that they have complex thoughts, emotions, actions as interesting as any male protagonist. That her two lead characters are so unappealing is unfortunate - Caroline is more than a bit wimpy and Maggie is strident and contradictory. The men they can't live without are creepy, condescending and dull. The book is interesting as a record of how second-wave feminism but stinks of mothballs, just the same.
Profile Image for Jennifer Struss.
158 reviews1 follower
May 4, 2023
Disclaimer: I read this book in the early 80's when I was 14-15. I must have reread it a few times, because there are still parts of the story I remember very well.

I remember loving this book at the time, although, looking back, it certainly gave me a . . . skewed . . . view of the probable outcome of crushes on teachers!
Profile Image for Stacie (BTR).
940 reviews6 followers
August 24, 2017
This book is dated and very conspicuous about its social conscience. That said, I would have scored it 3 stars if not for the fact that there is no ending.
Profile Image for JH.
1,607 reviews
April 17, 2025
I liked the premise but this book dragged for me. I prefer Klein’s first person POV books. I can’t believe there were zero repercussions for a teacher/student relationship!
Profile Image for Shelley.
2,509 reviews161 followers
May 24, 2015
Senior year and Maggie and Caroline's friendship is starting to fall apart as Maggie falls for her debate partner and Caroline starts a relationship with her science teacher. I think I probably shouldn't love this book as much as I do, but I really do. For a book with such strongly feminist-leaning characters, it's sort of often really not. But the characters are all full drawn and very complex, it's so perfectly evocative of the 70s, and I've always appreciated Maggie's almost clinical detachment from everything, even if I generally understand Carrie better. Even when I'm rereading as an adult and disagreeing or shaking my head at things, I think I read it so deeply at just the right age where I'll never be able to shake this story from my heart and brain. Rock on, Carrie and Justin - I hope you made it work.
Profile Image for alison .
124 reviews2 followers
August 5, 2025
I really, really like Norma Klein's third person writing. I have appreciated and enjoyed the sometimes-glib-sometimes-earnest first person narrators of the other Klein novels I've read, but I never felt so near or so involved with her characters as I did with Caroline and Maggie. Of course, I loved Maggie most, but that's just because of our shared opinions and temperament. Caroline is just as complex (arguably, more...?) than "fierce" Maggie.

I absolutely loved the ending. I think I need a complete Klein set.
Profile Image for Sue.
660 reviews6 followers
July 16, 2009
I love the cover art. When I was young and reading this novel I felt so grown up. It looks almost like a Harlequin romance.
Profile Image for Vanessa.
162 reviews28 followers
July 17, 2012
Read this when I was in
junior high, I was sucked into reading about teens exploring their sexuality and relationships.
Profile Image for Liz.
Author 7 books40 followers
June 15, 2015
This was the 1st "dirty" book I read as a pre-teen and re-reading it as an adult didn't disappoint. It's dated, but the nostalgia factor made it good.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews

Can't find what you're looking for?

Get help and learn more about the design.