As she walks through the city on New Year’s Eve, she strikes up conversations with nearly everyone she encounters. Lillian’s voice is distinctive-to be expected from a brilliant adwoman (and published poet!). Macy’s, how pregnancy forced her out of her job, and more. Throughout the flashbacks, we read about her life in New York in the late 1920s, how she came to be the highest-paid woman in advertising as a copywriter at R.H. Not knowing that throughout the entire book didn’t detract from it at all Rooney’s Boxfish is charming, self-assured, and more than a little ahead of her time. I learned from the author’s note that the novel is loosely based on the life of Margaret Fishback-a copywriter for R.H. While Lillian walks from Murray Hill to the Financial District to Chelsea and back to Murray Hill, we learn more about her life in flashbacks. For fear of over-using the phrase “love letter to New York,” I won’t call it that, but instead, it’s one woman’s story-Lillian Boxfish, an octogenarian who is out for a lengthy walk on New Year’s Eve in 1984. This book was recommended to me by a friend, and I quite enjoyed it. Review: It’s a total accident that this review and my most recent ( “Tuesday Nights in 1980” by Molly Prentiss) are set in New York City in the 1980s. Trigger Warnings: suicide attempts, alcoholism For now, after all, the night is still young. Lillian figures she might as well take her time. 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.Ī 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.

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. 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 was a job that, she says, 'in some ways saved my life, and in other ways ruined it.' Macy's to become the highest paid advertising woman in the country. Publisher Synopsis: She took 1930s New York by storm, working her way up writing copy for R.H. “Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk” by Kathleen Rooney

Lillian boxfish takes a walk a novel