A review by margaret21
The Strays of Paris by Jane Smiley

2.0

Goodness knows why i picked up a book featuring talking animals: not my kind of thing at all - though these creatures do only talk to each other, not to humans. I felt like a bit of escapism, and I got it. A book involving a runaway race horse, a street dog, a bird-splaining raven, a couple of ducks and a rat, whose lives interlock in the streets of Paris. Humans come into this tale as well. There's a shopkeeper who exchanges Frida-the-dog's proffered bank notes for green groceries: a child who cares for his nearly 100 year old blind grandmother and who takes in Paras the horse without his grandmother realising, among other smaller bit-parts. I enjoyed observing the characters and relationships develop, but at the two thirds point, I started to get impatient with the slow pace of the story, and I skipped straight to the last chapter, where the story panned out much as I had expected it to. A pleasant and even a charming read to soothe an embattled Covid-era brain.