![]() ![]() ![]() We follow Lillian’s struggles as a child whose parents were trying too hard to make a new life for their family and had little time to work on things modern society regards highly, such as self esteem. She refers to the readers as “darlings”, and as such embodies the infectious joie de vivre of someone in the vein of Auntie Mame or Holly Golightly two iconic popular culture storytellers who knew a story was only worth telling when it had the right flair to go along with it. Narrated by Lillian in her ’80s, as she looks back on her life, the book presents us with a narrator who is unreliable because sometimes she fails to see how blind she can be to the way in which her actions affect others. With a picaresque tone and first person narration reminiscent of Charles Dickens, Gilman’s novel is a delightful chronicle of New York history as seen through the eyes of the kind of person who built it and turned it into what it eventually became. This is Susan Jane Gilman’s multi decades sprawling novel about Malka Treynovsky, a Russian Jewish immigrant who would go on to become known as Lillian Dunkle, the dairy royal of the book’s title. “We’d been in America just three months when the horse ran over me.” With an opening line like that, it’s safe to say that it’s impossible not to be intrigued, and eventually completely seduced, by the charms of The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street. ![]()
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