LITERARY TITAN AWARD

"We will always carry the people we love most with us throughout our lives. It took a while for Judy Lipson to figure this out and not feel overwhelmed; even seeing people who knew her sisters was a harsh reminder of their passing. Lipson grew up tight-lipped, unable to express her grief for over thirty years. Lipson writes about losing her sisters, one to an accident and the other to a long, hard battle with mental illness. With this book, Lipson hopes to connect with people who feel the same inability to grieve their loss and help them.

The bond between siblings is a powerful thing. In Judy Lipson's Celebration of Sisters: It's Never Too Late to Grieve, we learn of Lipson's greatest tragedies and the grief she has over losing two of the most important people in her life, and the journey she has taken to heal from their loss. The book starts with the harrowing stories of Jane and Margie's deaths. Lipson's grief is palpable through her strong writing; her readers will feel the hard, cold reality of her loss. Starting with the loss of her sisters, Lipson helps readers to slowly understand her upheaval and why it took so long for her to find help.

Lipson shares memories from her childhood. These heart-warming stories relieve the depressing atmosphere of the book and encourage readers to continue with Lipson through her journey of healing. This is a very emotional story that will certainly tug at the heart. Readers will be overcome with empathy, but the story is ultimately uplifting.

Lipson's story of the passing of her sisters creates a strong foundation for the story structure. As we continue on to the beginning of Lipson's life, working our way through her childhood and slowly into adulthood while revisiting her sisters' deaths; this creates an almost half biography/diary sort of structure that is a bit chaotic, at times jumping around the timeline of Lipson's life, but otherwise engaging. While I enjoyed all the memoires that Lipson shares throughout this impassioned memoir, I felt that some of the memoires were repeated, which sometimes helped to reaffirm the scene but other times it felt repetitious.

I found this book to be a heart-aching reminder of my own loss. As a very empathetic person, I could not help but shed a few tears when I read about Margie and Jane. Even though this was an emotionally difficult book to read, I would recommend it to anyone who struggles with the grief of losing loved ones.
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Celebration of Sisters is a sentimental view into the life of someone who experienced tragedy and came out the other side to tell her story, and the story of those that are now gone. Readers who are looking for an emotionally honest and engrossing biography will find this book hard to put down."
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"What a great book!" - Library Titan

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