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Book Reviewed by:A love letter to city life, however shiny or sleazy, 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.
It's the last day of 1984, and 85-year-old Lillian Boxfish is about to take a walk.
As she traverses a grittier Manhattan, a city anxious after an attack by a still-at-large subway vigilante, she encounters bartenders, bodega clerks, chauffeurs, security guards, bohemians, criminals, children, parents, and parents-to-be - in surprising moments of generosity and grace. While she strolls, Lillian recalls a long and eventful life that included a brief reign as the highest-paid advertising woman in America - a career cut short by marriage, motherhood, divorce, and a breakdown.
Feminist, intelligent, independent, creative, authentic, a woman attempting to balance career and family during a time when it was next to impossible. Lilian is a woman you want to be, hope to be, dare to be, her rawness, brutal honesty and ownership are mesmerizing...continued
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(Reviewed by First Impressions Reviewers).
The titular character of Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk is modeled after real-life ad copywriter and poet, Margaret Fishback.
In a detailed biography of Fishback at the Poetry Foundation, Lillian Boxfish author Kathleen Rooney offers us a fascinating glimpse of a woman who was far ahead of her time, taking to print to declare that she didn't need a husband to support her. Starting out as a school teacher, Fishback took on a job at the lower rungs of copywriting at the prestigious department store R. H. Macy's (today referred to simply as Macy's) but quickly rose through the ranks, eventually becoming chief copywriter. She was a highly paid woman in the advertising world of the 1930s, a time when the Great Depression firmly had its ...
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There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are either well written or badly written. That is all.
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Daniel Handler, author of Why We Broke Up and We Are Pirates
Easily the best gadding-around-town novel since Dawn Powell and Dorothy Parker.
