Customer Reviews

Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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

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.

I loved this book -- thoroughly enjoyed the what's-next curiosity I had throughout and the fast emotional involvment I felt with the uniquely crafted, quirky characters. And all of it heightened by the context of fascinating historical concepts. Such fun to hear the different voices used to convey various times and perspectives, and Cooper's witty, fluid writing style tells it all with graceful, insightful ease. Such a pleasure, wanted more.

This book should be read simply because Cooper knows how to tell a compelling story. Half way through, I found myself unable to put it down. The transition from third person historical narrative to first person, while abrupt, was pulled off deftly, and the latter part of the book was utterly convincing for me. Throw in moments of laugh-out-loud hilarity and authentic, moving scenes, and you have a richly entertaining tale. Highly recommended.

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.

T Cooper manages to combine two very different (yet also quite
similar) stories with two very different voices into
one page-turning novel. Unique characters, combined
with a unique writing style make for a very
interesting, witty, and enjoyable read.

Five stars would have best described this book if the author had cut it short after Esther's story ended. The last semi-autobiographical part felt contrived and forced; the voice did not ring true for me. This author has tons of potential. I'll be on the look out for her next book.

i really wanted to like this book, especially after reading the glowing blurbs all over it and having it recommended to me by my favorite bookstore, but i found it to be a massive mess of a novel. it is basically two short stories and one novella posing as a unified work, and it does not flow well at all. the first 100 pages (one of the short stories) are brutal, and somewhat unnecessary. it would have worked better as a stand-alone work with more development and less violence. if you are a sensitive reader and you want to read this book, you truly can skip the first 100 pages and still get the gist of the next part (the novella). the details of a russian pogrom are not ones that you will easily forget.

i would have enjoyed the second section of the book--in fact if it had enormous potential to be developed by itself into a mature work had the author drawn out more of the other characters. i enjoyed this part of the work and would have like to have learned more about the characters from this period of esther's life. this part needed development.

the third part is a complete waste and absolutely destroys the flow of the book. there is so little connection to the previous 315 pages (aside from biology) that it disrupts any connection one may have felt previously. it definitely should have been a stand-alone work and would have been interesting as a short story, but instead it just sticks out like an indulgent literary exercise. and a badly written one at that.

overall this work reads like the author had three ideas for a work and couldn't decide which direction to go it, so all of them were used when two of them should have been discarded. do not waste your money on this.

The writing's all right, for the first hundred pages or so, but the content was unrelentingly dismal so I left off. I don't really need to be shown in vivid detail what Russian bigots did to some poor Jewish girl, what a skull fracture looks & smells like, or what heartbroken women do to themselves with razors, or children, desperate to be liked, with whatever they can find. After a while I told myself, "If this character does X, I'm putting the book down," X being an obvious and ill-chosen action; he did, and I did.

One thing about reading Stephen King is when you read the Dean Koontz remake of the same story, the latter usually pales in comparison!

Having read EminemsRevenge's "Jew Girl" which became available here on Amazon last September, and KNOWING that EminemsRevenge had previewed parts of his book on the Internet over the past couple of years, I have to wonder if T Cooper was also privy to those previews. Mixing Judaism with rap is a precarious balancing act that requires more of a Public Enemy approach than the insane "My Adidas" clown posse approach of Run DMC...and ER's Coltrane be-boppish "rap" style of writing seems more apropos for the subject.

T Cooper is more accesible though, since EminemsRevenge is more a latter-day James Joyce, so I would go to Cooper if I wanted a quick and uncomplicated read...but ER IS the master blaster when it comes to LITERARY rap!