Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk
Kathleen Rooney, Xe Sands
Rated: 3.85 of 5 stars
3.85
· 26 ratings · 302 pages · Published: 17 Jan 2017
In my reckless and undiscouraged youth, Lillian Boxfish writes, I worked in a walnut-paneled office thirteen floors above West Thirty-Fifth Street
She took 1930s New York by storm, working her way up writing copy for R.H. Macy s to become the highest paid advertising woman in the country. It was a job that, she says, in some ways saved my life, and in other ways ruined it.
Now it s the last night of 1984 and Lillian, 85 years old but just as sharp and savvy as ever, is on her way to a party. It s chilly enough out for her mink coat and Manhattan is grittier now her son keeps warning her about a subway vigilante on the prowl but the quick-tongued poetess has never been one to scare easily. On a walk that takes her over 10 miles around the city, she meets bartenders, bodega clerks, security guards, criminals, children, parents, and parents-to-be, while reviewing a life of excitement and adversity, passion and heartbreak, illuminating all the ways New York has changed and has not.
A love letter to city life in all its guts and grandeur, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney paints a portrait of a remarkable woman across the canvas of a changing America: from the Jazz Age to the onset of the AIDS epidemic; the Great Depression to the birth of hip-hop.
Lillian figures she might as well take her time. For now, after all, the night is still young.
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Tagged as:
- historical 3
- historical fiction 3
- literary fiction 3
- city/urban 3
- aging 3
- 20th century 3
- funny 2
- realistic 2
- drama 2
- family 2
- winter 2
- friendship 2
- on the move 1
- female mc 1
- classics 1
- psychological 1
- action / adventure 1
- Add topics
- format - reader age
- audiobook 3
- book 1
- adult fiction 1
- content warnings
- mental illness 3