Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

 

Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney

Fiction

2017

Finished on December 8, 2024

Rating: 3.5/5 (Good)

Any day you walk down a street and find nothing new but nothing missing counts as a good day in a city you love.

Publisher's Blurb:

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.

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.

Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk was slow to pull me in, but I didn't give up, and I wound up enjoying the story although it didn't wow me. I enjoy novels about women in their later years, but this story fell just shy of being one that I could love. One of my favorite things to do when visiting a new town or city is to wander up and down the streets, exploring neighborhoods and business districts. I've walked numerous miles in Victoria, Banff, Jasper, Port Townsend, Jackson, and London, to name a few. When my daughter and I were in NYC many years ago, we walked from our lovely hotel (The Peninsula) on 5th Avenue up to the Guggenheim Museum, then back down 5th all the way to Battery Park. Along the way, we admired St. Patrick's Cathedral, the New York Public Library, the Flatiron Building, and the World Trade Center. We took the ferry to the Statue of Liberty and then over to the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration. After more than eight miles, we were exhausted and caught a cab back to our hotel. And thus, I was happy to discover a map of Lillian's route of her New Year's Eve walk in NYC, and couldn't help but notice that it was very similar to the one we took in 1996! 

Other than the premise of spending New Year's Eve walking across Manhattan, I doubt I'll remember very many details about this book. But, if I make it back to NYC, I'd love to retrace Lillian's steps.