Review: The Strays by Emily Bitto

At age eight, Lily has led a perfectly ordinary life for an Australian girl in the 1930s. She is an only child from an ordinary, working class family who has recently relocated to a smaller home due to the depression. At her new school, she meets Eva, a charismatic child, who is one of three daughters of a famous painter. As the years go on, Lily finds herself drawn further and further inside the seemingly glamourous world of artist Evan Trentham, his wife Helena, their children and an eclectic mix of hangers on. The home itself is intended as a kind of utopia for aspiring artists. But nothing is as easy, or as glamourous as it seems in the Trentham's home, and when things go wrong, it is the Trentham daughters who pay the price ...

This was an intriguing novel, told from the perspective of a young outsider, who desperately wished to be an insider, even when she couldn't clearly see all that was going on in front of her, or how much the daughters, particularly Eva and Heloise, suffered for their parents lifestyle. Equally as strong within the narrative are themes of female friendship--how Eva and Lily could be so close and share so much, yet when they become adults realise that they have little or nothing in common but for their past. I also liked the setting of Melbourne in the 1930s.

Random Trivia: The Strays won the Stella Prize in 2015

Highly recommended.

This book was read as part of the Aussie Author Challenge 2018

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean...
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu...
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A...
Read more