Tag: Review

Book Review – Lillian Boxfish Takes A Walk by Kathleen Rooney

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About the Book

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 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.

Format: ebook (304 pages) Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Publication date: 17th January 2017 Genre: Contemporary Fiction

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My Review

Lillian is stylish, witty (even waspish at times), single-minded, successful, generous but also a woman whose life has not followed an untroubled path.  During her walk on New Year’s Eve, we learn about her pioneering career in advertising, her relationships and get hints of darker times that are only fully revealed towards the end of the book.  Lillian takes pride in her ability to use words as tools (whether to craft advertising copy or poetry) but also, on occasions, as weapons. Some of my favourites “Lillianisms” include:

  • “My mother resented Sadie like a stepsister resenting Cinderella, but she was polite. She did her no social violence.”
  • “This time of year is depressing. New Year’s Eve is a bigger thug than any mugger, the way it makes people feel.”
  • (About her colleague and bête noire, Olive): “I marvelled at her mother’s prescience in having named her daughter after a green – with envy – cocktail garnish: hollow and bitter.” Ouch!
  • (About her other bête noire, Julia): “She had a beautiful smile, if you like people who have thousands of teeth and no evident capacity ever to be sad.” Double ouch!

As well as the story of Lillian’s life, the book is a love letter to New York – “Any day you walk down a street and find nothing new but nothing missing counts as a good day in a city you love. People are forever tearing something down, replacing something irreplaceable” – and a celebration of walking and the art of flanerie. “Typically neither closeness nor distance matter much to me on my walks. Neither convenience nor difficulty is my objective.”

Another theme seems to be how bigotry and prejudice can cause people to miss out on potentially fulfilling relationships. I really enjoyed the book but, for me, not all of Lillian’s encounters during her walk were as successful or as meaningful as others. I was interested to learn that Lillian is inspired by a real person – Margaret Fishback, who, like her fictional counterpart, was a poet and the highest-paid female advertising copywriter in the world in the 1930s.  P.S. I love the cover.

I received an advance review copy courtesy of NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press

In three words: Stylish, witty, engaging

About the Author

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, as well as a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She teaches in the English Department at DePaul University, and her recent books include the national best-seller Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (St. Martin’s Press, 2017) and the novel Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey (Penguin, 2020). Where Are the Snows, her latest poetry collection, was chosen by Kazim Ali for the X.J. Kennedy Prize and published by Texas Review Press in Fall 2022. In September of 2023, her novel, From Dust to Stardust, based on the life and work of the silent movie star Colleen Moore, came out with Lake Union. With her sister Beth Rooney, she is the author of the picture book Leaf Town Forever, forthcoming in 2026 from University of Minnesota Press.

Her reviews and criticism have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Poetry Foundation website, The New York Times Book Review, Allure, The Chicago Review of Books, The Chicago Tribune, The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation and elsewhere.

She lives in Chicago with her spouse, the writer Martin Seay. (Photo/bio: Author website)

Connect with Kathleen
 Website | Bluesky

Book Review – Charlotte by David Foenkinos, trans. by Sam Taylor.

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About the Book

charlotte

Charlotte is the true story of Charlotte Salomon, born into a family stricken by suicide and a country at war but possessing an exceptional gift for painting. Just as she is coming in to her own as an artist, the Nazis come to power and, as a Jew, she is forced to flee from Berlin, from her family and her lover. Her short life ends tragically but not before she has left behind a unique legacy, the work entitled Life? or Theatre?, described as a song-play.

The author, David Foenkinos, came across Charlotte’s work through a friend and was immediately transfixed by it, becoming obsessed with finding out more about her. This book is his fictionalized biography of her life.

Format: ebook (225 pages) Publisher: Canongate
Publication date: 2nd February 2017 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

This is an unusual book, a fictionalised biography that is set out as if it is a prose poem with each new sentence on a new line. However, poetic phrases are rare; many lines are prosaic.

The author’s obsession with Charlotte seems overwhelming at times, his discovery of her work “the unexpected climax to all my vague longings” and becoming in his words “an occupied country”. He recounts his many attempts to write the book, his writer’s block that was a “physical sensation, an oppression” until his realization of the single line structure the book should have.

Charlotte’s story is tragic: the suicide of many family members, including her mother, her death in the Auschwitz concentration camp. A great talent cut off in its prime.

The book’s shortcoming is it cannot convey the power of Charlotte’s work, only describe it: “Singular, strange, poetic, feverish”. You are drawn to seek out images instead.

There were some lighter moments. His observation about Warburg’s “good neighbour” theory of how books should be arranged, that the book we are looking for is not necessarily the one we should read but the one next to it. The “slightly idiotic sympathy” he feels for Jonathan Safran Foer whose books are often placed next to his.

Charlotte is an intensely personal book so much so that reading it sometimes felt like intrusion into a private obsession.

I received an advance review copy courtesy of Canongate via NetGalley.

In three words: Biographical, distinctive, immersive

About the Author

David Foenkinos is a French author and screenwriter. His bestselling novel, Delicacy, was made into a film is December 2011 starring Audrey Tautou. His novels have appeared in over forty languages, and in 2014 he was awarded the Prix Renaudot for his novel Charlotte.

Growing up in a home with few books and often absent parents, David Foenkinos read and wrote little during his childhood. At 16, he required emergency surgery as a result of a rare pleural infection and spent several months recuperating in hospital, where he began to devour books, learning to paint and play the guitar. From this experience, he says, he kept a drive for life, a force that he wanted to convey through his books.

He studied literature at the Sorbonne and music in a jazz school, eventually becoming a guitar teacher. In the evenings, he was a waiter in a restaurant. After unsuccessfully trying to set up a music group, he turned his hand to writing.

After a handful of failed manuscripts, he found his style, and his first novel Inversion de l’idiotie: de l’influence de deux Polonais (Inversion of idiocy: influenced by two Poles), though refused by many other publishers, was published by Gallimard in 2002; the book earned him the François-Mauriac literary prize, awarded by the Académie Française.