The Strays follows a young girl, Lily, in Australia, beginning with her childhood during the Great Depression and then concluding with an adult retrospective. Lily is an only child and when she begins at a new school, she befriends the vibrant Eva who lives with her parents and two sisters. Eva’s parents, particularly her father, are artists and their house becomes a gathering point for many other Australian artists and their bohemian lifestyle.
Lily, although she feels disloyal, vastly prefers Eva’s family to her own, and her time with them forces her to examine her own ideas about growing up, family, friendship, and the complexities of isolation and togetherness.
I think I would have read this book differently had I not been a mother. My heart ached for both Lily and Eva, neither of home received the parenting that they deserved, and for their mothers who were simply unable to provide things for their volatile teenaged daughters. I had a hard time relating to either Lily or Eva- relating instead to the mothers who were more auxiliary characters. The mothers were, to me, more compelling characters than the daughters.
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