7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
SOMEWHAT QUIRKY NONETHELESS INTRIGUING, June 13, 2006
This author's first book, Some of the Parts, established her as one who created strong voiced characters , and wove somewhat quirky nonetheless intriguing plots. She follows this pattern with her second novel - there's little self-effacing about Esther or T. Cooper.
Our story of the Lipshitz family begins with their escape from 1903 Russia and the cruel pogroms. Esther, Hersh and their four children gratefully arrive at Ellis Island only to discover that their son, Reuven, is nowhere to be found. They search all over New York City for their blond, blue-eyed son but are stymied at every turn. Finally, the family join a relative in Texas and establish a home in a place the most unlike Russia they've seen - the dusty panhandle of the
Lone Star State.
Esther continues to mourn the loss of her son, and when she sees a newspaper photo of Charles Lindbergh announcing his 1927 transatlantic flight she becomes convinced that he is her long lost son now grown and famous. She is so obsessed by this notion that she corresponds with the Lindbergh family and saves every scrap of news about the aviator.
Now, segue to New York City a half a century later and Esther's great-grandson, T. Cooper, a writer who is not doing much writing but earns his bread and butter by imitating Eminem at bar mitzvahs.
When Cooper's parents are killed in an auto accident he returns to Texas to make final arrangements, and it is there that he faces his strange family history.
Actor/musician Kirby Heyborne gives a notable reading to the Lipshitz saga, by turns imbuing it with dogged determination, consternation, and humor.
- Gail Cooke
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A gripping story from an original voice, March 23, 2006
This is a fascinating, ambitious far-ranging book. In the hands of a lesser storyteller, such disparate material could have failed to cohere, but T Cooper guides the reader through this multi-generational saga with expertise and materful writing. The buzz surrounding Cooper is well-deserved; this book is both weighty and readable, funny and emotionally riveting.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Sucker Punch, June 7, 2009
This review is from: Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes (Paperback)
I took a chance on this book from the back-of-the-book description alone, and now that I've finished, I can't help feeling that the marketing for the book was purposefully misleading. The description is accurate as far as it goes, but it only covers half of the story - there isn't even a hint of the second part, which I feel was T Cooper's main thrust, the reason for the novel in the first place. That the revelations at the very end might be distasteful to some readers is neither here nor there, but the fact that they are 'sprung' without any warning makes me feel as if the author was trying to shock me. It reminds me of social behavior some people flaunt expressly to make others uncomfortable.
It's a shame, as the first part of the book - a third-person, multi-generational account of one Russian-Jewish family's emigration to America - certainly kept my interest. The Lipshitz 6, Hersh and Esther (T Cooper's great-grandparents) and their 4 children, arrive at Ellis Island in the first decade of the 20th century, and in the crush of people, Esther loses their second oldest son, Reuven. He is never recovered, and Esther obsesses over him for years. She visits a palm reader years later, and through the hints he gives her, she comes to believes that her boy was taken in by Gentiles, and grew up to be Charles Lindbergh.
A well told story, for the most part, excluding a completely gratuitous scene describing a tryst between the oldest Lipshitz boy, Ben, when grown, and another man during the ticker tape parade given for Lindbergh in New York. Ben as a character nearly disappears after this event, and it was almost as if he only existed as an excuse to include the descriptive, almost explicit sex scene. But even if that segment had been cut, the rest of the narrative never quite achieves a level of involvement necessary to distinguish it from the hordes of other family sagas. It's truly more of a framework for the second part of the book - a meta-fictional account exploring the death of Cooper's parents and the implication of the family's history on the present (and conceivable) progeny. However, the obscenity-laced mixture of anger and superiority Cooper shoves in our faces while contemplating life and the world around him feels like an attack - almost as if it's unbelievable to the author that I've been stupid enough to enjoy the first part of the book.
I am not Cooper's intended audience. As a DJ/rapper/Eminem impersonator in demand on the wealthy Bar Mitzvah circuit, Cooper's persona carries an obligation to alienate squares like me, a task thoroughly accomplished in the book's second half. In the final chapters, Cooper acts like an insecure child, one that feels they must heap insult and shock onto any innocent bystander that's foolish enough to lend a helping hand. By the time I got to the revelations of Cooper's gender ambiguity, carefully disguised until the last few pages, it felt like one last hysterical declaration flung in my face.
Had I known about Cooper's self-absorbed rant in the second half, I wouldn't have bought the book - but there isn't any indication of it in the synopsis, and is only alluded to in the two editorial reviews on Amazon. It's fine for T Cooper to write whatever she wishes, and I'm sure that many people will find it entertaining. I'm just not one of them. I have hundreds of other books waiting for me, books I'm looking forward to, and getting fooled into buying this one feels a bit like a sucker punch. It's not likely to happen again.
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