"Between author Rooney's story and narrator Xe Sands's craftsmanship, this Walk will sweep listeners off their feet...Through Sands we feel the force of Lillian's personality โ with all its drive, wit, and grace โ as well as the counterforces that want to constrain it." โ AudioFile Magazine
NOW A NATIONAL INDIE BESTSELLER
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.
โIn my reckless and undiscouraged youth,โ Lillian Boxfish writes, โI worked in a walnut-paneled office thirteen floors above West Thirty-Fifth Street...โ
She took 1930s New York by storm, working her way up writing copy for R.H. Macyโs to become the highest paid advertising woman in the country. It was a job that, she says, โin some ways saved my life, and in other ways ruined it.โ
Now itโs 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. Itโs chilly enough out for her mink coat and Manhattan is grittier nowโher son keeps warning her about a subway vigilante on the prowlโbut 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 changedโand has not.
Lillian figures she might as well take her time. For now, after all, the night is still young.
โTransporting...witty, poignant and sparkling.โ
โPeople (People Picks Book of the Week)