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3.83 AVERAGE
3.83 AVERAGE
Abandoned halfway through I probably should have read the synopsis and not even picked it up. It's very well written but not for me. Personal preferences strikes: NYC based; uppity/vain unlikable main character; main character is an author.
This book completely transported me into Lillian Boxfish’s world. I loved seeing the city from her point of view and looking back at her life. She’s a character that jumped off the page and I’ll keep thinking about, along with researching the woman who inspired her.
emotional
funny
inspiring
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
This is just the loveliest book, so whimsical and engaging. It's almost told in real time as a stream of consciousness narrative - Lillian Boxfish goes for a walk on New Years Eve, it's the story of that walk, the characters she meets, the stories from her life that come up along the way. Not that much really happens, but equally a whole lifetime of stories are told between interactions with the characters she meets. The characters are all so well painted that the whole story is just utterly believable. One to be re-read sometime.
Synopsis: On the last night of 1983, Lillian Boxfish finds herself taking a walk through New York City, reminiscing the good times and the bad, remembering what she was like as the highest paid woman ad-writer of her time, as a poet, as a broken woman, and as she is now—not entirely whole, not entirely all-right, but certainly not like any old lady you know.
Keeping with the theme of “okay” books and moving to the other end of the age spectrum, I also listened to the audio of Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk earlier in the month. The voice for the audio is fantastic—she sounds like the octogenarian Lillian without having a voice that sounded grating or shrill or like the voice actor was trying to sound “old.” With the narrative itself, I have gotten the sense from a few other readers that Lillian Boxfish is a book that several readers gave up on—I do think it takes over a third of the way in until the book picks up sharply. The first third or more is a veeeeeery slooooooow setting of the stage and introduction of Lillian’s character so that when she meets her future husband, the reader experiences a shift of a startling magnitude—it isn’t that Lillian is being inconsistent, but rather, you see how what you thought of Lillian—how what she thought of herself—wasn’t entirely accurate. How others can have a profound and lasting impact on us, even after they are gone.
The struggle with this book, however, is that the first third provides so little payoff that it is hard to feel like continuing to read (or listen) is worth the time—you don’t see that back-end payoff coming, ever. I will admit that if any of the books I had on my hold list for audiobooks had come available at the time, I’m not sure I would have stuck this one out. The first third to half was a driving-only audiobook. The second half swiftly became the laundry-folding, shower-cleaning can’t-put-down variety.
Lillian as a narrator is tongue-in-cheek funny and is the kind of old lady I think I’d like to be. Her snappy one-liners were really the highlight of the book for me. Some of my favorite samples:
“His expression was sheepish enough to supply a Highland village with wool and milk. I cocked a loaded eyebrow.”
“Most of what we consider beauty is manufactured. But the fact of that manufacture does not make it unbeautiful.”
“For though I was raised Protestant, my true religion is actually civility.”
“One need not believe in something for it to happen anyway.”
“Choice is an illusion promoted by the powerful.”
If you’ve got time to invest, Lillian Boxfish may be worth your time but this is ultimately a take-it-or-leave-it book for me.
Notes
Published: January 17, 2017 by St. Martin’s Press (@stmartinspress)
Author: Kathleen Rooney
Date read: February 8, 2018
Rating: 3 stars
Enjoyed this review? Check out more at http://lisaannreads.com
Keeping with the theme of “okay” books and moving to the other end of the age spectrum, I also listened to the audio of Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk earlier in the month. The voice for the audio is fantastic—she sounds like the octogenarian Lillian without having a voice that sounded grating or shrill or like the voice actor was trying to sound “old.” With the narrative itself, I have gotten the sense from a few other readers that Lillian Boxfish is a book that several readers gave up on—I do think it takes over a third of the way in until the book picks up sharply. The first third or more is a veeeeeery slooooooow setting of the stage and introduction of Lillian’s character so that when she meets her future husband, the reader experiences a shift of a startling magnitude—it isn’t that Lillian is being inconsistent, but rather, you see how what you thought of Lillian—how what she thought of herself—wasn’t entirely accurate. How others can have a profound and lasting impact on us, even after they are gone.
The struggle with this book, however, is that the first third provides so little payoff that it is hard to feel like continuing to read (or listen) is worth the time—you don’t see that back-end payoff coming, ever. I will admit that if any of the books I had on my hold list for audiobooks had come available at the time, I’m not sure I would have stuck this one out. The first third to half was a driving-only audiobook. The second half swiftly became the laundry-folding, shower-cleaning can’t-put-down variety.
Lillian as a narrator is tongue-in-cheek funny and is the kind of old lady I think I’d like to be. Her snappy one-liners were really the highlight of the book for me. Some of my favorite samples:
“His expression was sheepish enough to supply a Highland village with wool and milk. I cocked a loaded eyebrow.”
“Most of what we consider beauty is manufactured. But the fact of that manufacture does not make it unbeautiful.”
“For though I was raised Protestant, my true religion is actually civility.”
“One need not believe in something for it to happen anyway.”
“Choice is an illusion promoted by the powerful.”
If you’ve got time to invest, Lillian Boxfish may be worth your time but this is ultimately a take-it-or-leave-it book for me.
Notes
Published: January 17, 2017 by St. Martin’s Press (@stmartinspress)
Author: Kathleen Rooney
Date read: February 8, 2018
Rating: 3 stars
Enjoyed this review? Check out more at http://lisaannreads.com
I liked reading about Lillian Boxfish. Her story was very interesting--if a little confusing to connect at a couple of points. I also really like where the author got the inspiration for this book.
Let me begin by saying this is my first 5-star read of the year and I know there is no way I can possibly do it justice. You must read it. My library copy, here beside me, is thick with sticky-arrows where I wanted to write in the margins or underline one of the many beautiful sentences and passages, thus, I am saving my pennies to buy my own copy so I can return to and revel in it again and again, as I do with the works of Helene Hanff, Dorothy Parker, and the correspondence of William Maxwell with both Eudora Welty and Sylvia Townsend Warner. I loved it --- no, LOVE it, present tense.
Of course, I would. These are some of the other things in life I most love: books and great writing, New York City --- especially historical New York City, people who are erudite, witty, literate, well-bred, empathetic, kind but not cloying, strong of spine and conscientious of character, who recognize and own their strengths and flaws in equal measure, going about their lives without indulging in whiny, navel-gazing excuse-making.
Lillian would have none of that. Here is the synopsis of the novel found on Kathleen Rooney's website [click here to go there]:
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.
In this post 11/9 tragic election world gone mad and cruel and hateful, what a joy to find relief and solace in a well-written, spellbinding novel.
While Lillian's walk is a journey through the city she loves, it is even more an exploration of the time she has spent on earth as she approaches her life's end. The tarriances during her odyssey --- walk and life --- range from touching to tragic, and are always fascinating, insightful, and revealing, and often quite funny. Her descriptions of landmarks in the city are viscerally evocative, transporting the reader through time and space in a way nearly magical. Her language resonates with the patois of a smarter, more sophisticated reality where wit, savvy, good breeding, and literacy were valued, a world in which one was not only allowed to aim higher than the lowest common denominator, but expected to want to do so, to aspire to learnedness and enlightenment. Lillian's outlook and world are blessed antidote to the deplorable and disastrous embrace in this country of ignorance and pig-headed refusal to evolve being paraded as traditional values and patriotism; Lillian would not tolerate such fatuous asininity, and neither shall I.
There are so many gorgeous passages in Kathleen Rooney's novel, I am loath to quote one because it will require I make a Sophie's Choice among so many glorious sentences; too, it will deny you the pleasure of first discovery. Still, I feel I must give you an inkling of the treasures that await you, so, here, near book's end when Lillian has been asked to appear on a panel about the history and future of advertising.
"I'm afraid I've arrived unprepared to defend my approach to writing ads," I said, "never mind the very concept of professional responsibility, or the practice of simply treating people with respect. Therefore I'm compelled to defer to the au courant experience of my two successors. Please, ladies, resume the accounts of your efforts to unwind the supposed advances of civilization and return us consumers to a state of pliable savagery. Who knows, perhaps some young lady who watches this program will take up where you leave off and find a way to ease us all back into the trees with the orangutans, who I gather are deft hands at the fruit market. With luck and hard work, perhaps we'll even recover our old gills and quit terrestrial life entirely. Back to the sea! That Florida swampland Mother bought may prove to be a good investment after all. In any event, I wish you both luck in your quest. I will not be keeping track of your progress, however. My interests, such as they are, lie elsewhere. To be clear, it's not that I no longer want to work in the world that you're describing. It's that I no longer want to live in the world you're describing."
That paragraph alone pretty much sums up my feelings about the world today. And it is not the only time in Lillian Boxfish Takes A Walk when Lillian speaks for me; or, speaks as I wish I could have or had spoken. I have, I think, not aged as well as I might, but, too, not as badly as some people of my acquaintance seem to think. So, if you will indulge me, one more Lillian quote (as translated by the extraordinarily gifted Ms. Rooney):
I think I look all right. But who's to say? The insouciance of youth doesn't stay, but shades into "eccentricity," as people say when they are trying to be kind, until finally you become just another lonely crackpot. But I've always been this way.The strangeness just used to seem more fashionable, probably."
Exactly. The thing I found so very special and marvelous about this book is that Lillian's mordant and perceptive observations about life, time, culture, relationships, and herself describe better than anything I've ever read that space in the soul and mind and consciousness in which each of us lives, that private haven, the solitude of self where we must balance what and who we think we are with the perceptions of others about what and who they think we are, and, too, find a way to fit the largeness of all the possibilities and dreams of our secret, private, unseen souls into the world in which we've been thrust, the circumstances we've been given, the limitations we face. I don't know about you, but for me, that has been life's journey; questioning if what I am seeing and thinking and feeling is "true" when, so often, the rest of the world doesn't quite see it that way, doesn't quite get it, doesn't quite get me.
I got Lillian Boxfish. And, I like to think, she'd get me. And, trust me, you want to know her. Buy this book. Don't borrow it or library it: BUY IT. You will want to mark pages and make notes and return to it again and again when you are feeling in need of a wise and dear friend.
Of course, I would. These are some of the other things in life I most love: books and great writing, New York City --- especially historical New York City, people who are erudite, witty, literate, well-bred, empathetic, kind but not cloying, strong of spine and conscientious of character, who recognize and own their strengths and flaws in equal measure, going about their lives without indulging in whiny, navel-gazing excuse-making.
Lillian would have none of that. Here is the synopsis of the novel found on Kathleen Rooney's website [click here to go there]:
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.
In this post 11/9 tragic election world gone mad and cruel and hateful, what a joy to find relief and solace in a well-written, spellbinding novel.
While Lillian's walk is a journey through the city she loves, it is even more an exploration of the time she has spent on earth as she approaches her life's end. The tarriances during her odyssey --- walk and life --- range from touching to tragic, and are always fascinating, insightful, and revealing, and often quite funny. Her descriptions of landmarks in the city are viscerally evocative, transporting the reader through time and space in a way nearly magical. Her language resonates with the patois of a smarter, more sophisticated reality where wit, savvy, good breeding, and literacy were valued, a world in which one was not only allowed to aim higher than the lowest common denominator, but expected to want to do so, to aspire to learnedness and enlightenment. Lillian's outlook and world are blessed antidote to the deplorable and disastrous embrace in this country of ignorance and pig-headed refusal to evolve being paraded as traditional values and patriotism; Lillian would not tolerate such fatuous asininity, and neither shall I.
There are so many gorgeous passages in Kathleen Rooney's novel, I am loath to quote one because it will require I make a Sophie's Choice among so many glorious sentences; too, it will deny you the pleasure of first discovery. Still, I feel I must give you an inkling of the treasures that await you, so, here, near book's end when Lillian has been asked to appear on a panel about the history and future of advertising.
"I'm afraid I've arrived unprepared to defend my approach to writing ads," I said, "never mind the very concept of professional responsibility, or the practice of simply treating people with respect. Therefore I'm compelled to defer to the au courant experience of my two successors. Please, ladies, resume the accounts of your efforts to unwind the supposed advances of civilization and return us consumers to a state of pliable savagery. Who knows, perhaps some young lady who watches this program will take up where you leave off and find a way to ease us all back into the trees with the orangutans, who I gather are deft hands at the fruit market. With luck and hard work, perhaps we'll even recover our old gills and quit terrestrial life entirely. Back to the sea! That Florida swampland Mother bought may prove to be a good investment after all. In any event, I wish you both luck in your quest. I will not be keeping track of your progress, however. My interests, such as they are, lie elsewhere. To be clear, it's not that I no longer want to work in the world that you're describing. It's that I no longer want to live in the world you're describing."
That paragraph alone pretty much sums up my feelings about the world today. And it is not the only time in Lillian Boxfish Takes A Walk when Lillian speaks for me; or, speaks as I wish I could have or had spoken. I have, I think, not aged as well as I might, but, too, not as badly as some people of my acquaintance seem to think. So, if you will indulge me, one more Lillian quote (as translated by the extraordinarily gifted Ms. Rooney):
I think I look all right. But who's to say? The insouciance of youth doesn't stay, but shades into "eccentricity," as people say when they are trying to be kind, until finally you become just another lonely crackpot. But I've always been this way.The strangeness just used to seem more fashionable, probably."
Exactly. The thing I found so very special and marvelous about this book is that Lillian's mordant and perceptive observations about life, time, culture, relationships, and herself describe better than anything I've ever read that space in the soul and mind and consciousness in which each of us lives, that private haven, the solitude of self where we must balance what and who we think we are with the perceptions of others about what and who they think we are, and, too, find a way to fit the largeness of all the possibilities and dreams of our secret, private, unseen souls into the world in which we've been thrust, the circumstances we've been given, the limitations we face. I don't know about you, but for me, that has been life's journey; questioning if what I am seeing and thinking and feeling is "true" when, so often, the rest of the world doesn't quite see it that way, doesn't quite get it, doesn't quite get me.
I got Lillian Boxfish. And, I like to think, she'd get me. And, trust me, you want to know her. Buy this book. Don't borrow it or library it: BUY IT. You will want to mark pages and make notes and return to it again and again when you are feeling in need of a wise and dear friend.
Every so often a book comes along that I don’t want to finish. I hated that Lillian’s walk finished and I was no longer part of her life.
While every stranger on the street was powerless against Lillian Boxfish's charm, I was not. I did not find her charming but rather quite full of herself.
And yes, there were quite a few strangers on the streets of 1980's NYC, many of whom were conveniently disadvantaged in some way, and all of whom share their innermost feelings with Boxfish about five minutes after meeting her. Get it? She's THAT charming!
Macy's this and Macy's that...I GET IT, LADY, YOU WORKED AT MACY'S.
And yes, there were quite a few strangers on the streets of 1980's NYC, many of whom were conveniently disadvantaged in some way, and all of whom share their innermost feelings with Boxfish about five minutes after meeting her. Get it? She's THAT charming!
Macy's this and Macy's that...I GET IT, LADY, YOU WORKED AT MACY'S.