Beautifully written book about the plight of women forced by financial pressures to leave their countries and families. It’s about their invisibility in the new country. The story is based on a news article, but is fiction. It’s also about different kinds of love. It’s a moving story and I highly recommend it.

I should not have liked this book. A missing person, a suspenseful telling and scenes describing the hunting of songbirds are difficult to read - not my usual fare. Yet, it was impossible not to be taken with this sad and enlightening story. It’s as beautifully written as [book:The Beekeeper of Aleppo|43124137], a book that has stayed with me. The novel is inspired by true events of migrant women who went missing in Cyprus and how it came to be is emotionally described in the not to be missed author’s note. Christy Lefteri is the daughter of Cyprian refugees and it is clear that her heart is on every page.

I received a copy of this book from Ballantine/Random House through NetGalley.

I really appreciate how Christy Lefteri draws from her own experiences and creates beautiful stories. Songbirds is sweet and heartbreaking, and it was even more so after I read Lefteri’s note at the end of the book. This book taught me a lot about Cyprus and the plight of many domestic workers throughout the world.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the arc.

Thanks to Netgalley and Random House for an ARC: "Songbirds" is a compelling story about domestic workers in Cyprus who are essentially indentured servants who are dehumanized and work with no protections or recognition. It follows the story of Nisha, a woman from Sri Lanka who has cared for a child since birth, impeccably and at great personal sacrifice, and suddenly goes missing. In the search for her, she becomes a real person to her employer, Petra. Her lover makes his living capturing endangered songbirds for restaurants. The writing is deft and light, but the subject is profound. The dehumanization of domestic workers. All of the characters are flawed, but all are united by the missing Nisha. The metaphor of an endangered songbird captured in a net for a delicacy and the domestic workers who labor with no protection is apt. The story moved quickly. Ultimately, a haunting but beautiful book

Such a sweet, sad story about a beloved nanny who mysteriously vanishes. Alternating between the points of view of her employer and her fiancée who try to discover where she went. This book was inspired by the real-life disappearance of domestic workers in Cyprus.

When you see the images on television of people, women, children – desperate to find a safe life and opportunity elsewhere who risk everything: violence, lives, friendships, and money – just to start again – do you ever wonder? I always do – just how desperate and horrible things must be for you to risk it all and leave: not knowing anything about where you will land EXCEPT you have the hopes it will be better? Or what about those who have left their families and children behind, mainly to take advantage of opportunities elsewhere to earn money to send home in the hopes that your family will fare better with your contributions?

This story, based in Cyprus introduces us to Yiannis – a poacher who spends his time during the migration of songbirds capturing them to sell on the black market – and his love for Nisha who left Sri Lanka to work as a domestic, sending money home to the relatives who are raising her daughter. About her employer Petra and her struggles to get the authorities to pay attention when Nisha goes missing – and they think she’s simply another immigrant who took advantage of the option to flee the work and start over. More broadly it’s about the struggle of refugees and the plight of many – finding not opportunity but abuse and even death – all in efforts to make a better life for their own families.

Much like the first I read from this author – there are tears, tension, worry and a sense of despair, yet there is hope. The strength and determination to take on the odds in the effort to make a difference: the self-denial and deprivation required to send every possible penny back, and the good fortune when one meets someone who truly cares - a rarity in most cases. There is information and truths buried within this book as well, as the story is based in disappearances that are, probably, more common than described here, and the dismissal by authorities: whether from actual disinterest, dislike of the foreigners, lack of funds or even the simple – don't have the wherewithal to investigate – the story will leave you asking questions and seeing the stories of refugees desperate at border crossings (or chancing the illegal options) in a whole new light.

I received an eArc copy of the title from the publisher via NetGalley for purpose of honest review. I was not compensated for this review: all conclusions are my own responsibilty.

Review first appeared at <a href=” https://wp.me/p3OmRo-aXX /” > <a> I am, Indeed </a>

Another beautifully written novel by Christy Lefteri. When Sri Lankan maid, Nisha, goes missing her boyfriend, Nianis and boss, Petra, go to great lengths to find out what happened. While investigating her disappearance, they discover how much she means to them. Lefteri evokes so many emotions in her writing. She has a great feel for the plight of domestic workers brought over from their home countries to work far away, and leaving so much behind.

This beautifully written book is an homage to the women across the globe who are victimized, abused or killed simply because they are foreign or dependent on the favor of men. So many stories, so many lives touched by these women and then they simply disappear. Haunting and beautiful and memorable.

Songbirds tells the story of Nisha, a nanny and housemaid gone missing, through the voices of her employer and the man she loves. From these two very different perspectives, Lefteri demonstrates how much Nisha loves and cares for others and yet how her love and care is so often ignored or taken for granted. Petra, Nisha’s employer for nearly a decade, only recognizes the amount of work Nisha performs on a daily basis after she has to prepare meals, get her own daughter ready for school, and clean house—tasks left unperformed with Nisha’s sudden disappearance. Moreover, it is only after discovering a locket and lock of hair in Nisha’s room that Petra begins to think of Nisha as someone with her own loved ones. This humanizing of migrant workers radiates throughout the novel as Petra talks to more and more workers in her search for Nisha and learns of their experiences, their work environments, their reasons for leaving their home countries, and the dismissive ways that local men, the police, and even their own employers think of them.

At the same time that Lefteri exposes demeaning and dangerous racial and class prejudices, she metaphorically connects the migrant workers to migratory songbirds being poached on their journey from Africa to Europe. Her explicit descriptions of the poaching practices emphasize a brutality against these birds that’s not so different from the treatment of women like Nisha. Moreover, Lefteri moves beyond metaphor as she demonstrates how such harmful behaviors hurt animals and environments as well as people. This book is really a must-read for its intricate and critical interweaving of human and environmental issues. Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for a free ARC in exchange for an honest review.

“Songbirds” left an impression on me and not from the shock of finding sickening material in the book. I really did not like the side story in between some of the chapters and saw no reason for it. It took away from the gist of the story in my opinion and I did not even read them after the first few. But as I said, the book left an impression on me due to the plight of many migrant workers, and particularly the women domestic migrants who left their home and families to get work. I would recommend Songbirds to some friends, but not to people who can’t handle the killing of animals of any kind. Christy Lefteri told a good story that really needed to be told. Be sure to read the author’s notes at the end.

I was already a fan of Lefteri’s after reading The Beekeeper of Aleppo, and now Songbirds confirms it. Another beautifully crafted and haunting novel that I could not put down, with complex and layered characters. I was initially pulled in by Nisha’s story, a missing nanny from Sri Lanka who was working for Petra in Cyprus. But both Petra’s and Yiannis’ stories were what kept me turning the pages. Petra grew and changed so much throughout the book, and I loved learning about and falling in love with Nisha right alongside Petra. My heart broke for Yiannis, Nisha’s boyfriend and a songbird poacher, as he grappled with Petra’s disappearance as well as the questionable morality of poaching, all while nurturing an injured bird.

Besides being a beautiful story, Songbirds shines a light on the hidden narrative of the domestic workers in countries like Cyprus, revealing the often-overlooked stories about the heartbreaking choices these women have to make in order to feed their families, their daily challenges with little time off, as well as the widespread prejudice against them. Both the domestic workers and Yiannis’ poached songbirds are trapped and not able to get free, a stunning juxtaposition. I was happy that we finally heard from Nisha herself, at the very end of the book.

I can’t wait to read Lefteri’s next book. My thanks to NetGalley for an Advanced Readers Copy of this book. All opinions are my own and not biased in any way

𝑰 𝒇𝒆𝒍𝒍 𝒂𝒔𝒍𝒆𝒆𝒑 𝒃𝒚 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒇𝒊𝒓𝒆 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒅𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒎𝒆𝒅 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝑵𝒊𝒔𝒉𝒂 𝒘𝒂𝒔 𝒎𝒂𝒅𝒆 𝒐𝒇 𝒔𝒂𝒏𝒅. 𝑺𝒉𝒆 𝒅𝒊𝒔𝒔𝒐𝒍𝒗𝒆𝒅 𝒃𝒆𝒇𝒐𝒓𝒆 𝒎𝒆 𝒍𝒊𝒌𝒆 𝒂 𝒄𝒂𝒔𝒕𝒍𝒆 𝒐𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒔𝒉𝒐𝒓𝒆.

Songbirds speaks for women whose stories would otherwise remain untold. Tales of migrants who must venture out finding work far from their own children and families as a means for a better future. Workers who are unseen, caretakers of children for those who hire them while their own must be left behind in their homeland. Often, assumptions are made about such women, this is one of those stories.

Petra’s house is a three-story Venetian property not far from the Green Line, or “Buffer Zone”, that divides the island into a northern (Turkish Cypriots) and southern region (Greek Cypriots). An island that Petra tells us, has seen the influence of both Europe and the Middle East-“sitting in crystal-blue waters of the Eastern Mediterranean’. Cyprus has been occupied and colonized, a battleground too between the Turks and Greeks. Petra’s city of Nicosia is on the Greek side but ‘brushes the line’, it is a land of ‘uneasy peace’. It is here that Nisha works, far from her own child and life in Sri Lanka, for Petra as nanny and maid. Yiannis, Nisha’s lover, rents a flat from Petra spending his time poaching protected, beautiful, little songbirds, an illegal yet lucrative career. One that he doesn’t want to do forever. Petra, like many other locals, assumes Yiannis is simply collecting mushrooms, herbs and snails as his job, but it would never be enough to support himself or the future he longs to share with Nisha. He wants to marry her, take her back to Sri Lanka where they can be a family including her own daughter Kumari. Like the dream he had, she disappears like a castle on the shore.

Living a divided life, Nisha’s link to Kumari is through phone calls late at night. When Petra notices she isn’t making her nightly call, she heads to bed but by the next morning there is no sign of Nisha in the kitchen cooking breakfast, nor is her own daughter Aliki ready for school, all Nisha’s tasks. By nightfall she still isn’t home, something is wrong. Aliki knows more about Nisha than her mother, from the hair she keeps in her drawer to the cherished locket. Her daughter loves Nisha like a mother, and as Petra makes more troubling discoveries, like her passport still in her room, she must face the reality that something terrible may have happened.

Yiannis is just as concerned, crazy with fear. She isn’t just another nameless woman who ‘comes and goes like the rain’ no matter what others say. This disparaging, eye-opening comment brings to mind the many women on the island who work hard, usually coming from lives of struggle and poverty, with no other choice than to leave their own lives behind to earn money in foreign lands. Often, like Nisha, they leave their own children in the care of family members to care for other people’s children, lives and hearts divided. Nisha treats Aliki with tenderness, providing her the nurturing she isn’t free to give her own child in person. Far more the norm than the cruel assumption that ‘those types’ are devious, scheming, fallen women. Songbirds exposes bigger divides than the Green Line, it is a class and race divide, one that Yiannis must also confront at every turn in his own life trying to make a living. Much of the world’s inhabitants don’t have the luxury of choices, sometimes those engaging in criminal careers fall into it out of a desperation those from higher classes don’t comprehend. For the women migrants it’s something different, a dangerous sexism that can take one’s life.

Most people on the island hire domestic workers, the very people they rely on to run their lives, that they entrust their children to are the very same people they denigrate and make generalized assumptions about. Petra’s own reasons are a sorrowful tale too, but through Nisha’s vanishing it’s a hard truth to own that she didn’t much see her as a person with her own hopes, dreams, sorrows. Without Nisha, how different her world and Aliki’s would be. It is the bond between Petra’s own daughter and Nisha that pushes her to find the answers to her disappearance, knowing all too well that she would never have just left, no matter what other people may say. The agency Nisha works for doesn’t care about anything beyond her debt, the authorities won’t concern themselves with every woman who up and disappears- better let someone else worry about it rather than waste their time investigating. Petra should just clean the room and find another maid, according to the police. She cannot, in good conscience, just let her disappearance go nor forget that she has a child only two years older than her own who needs answers, a mother.

As the story grows, Petra realizes there was a lot she didn’t know about Nisha’s life, particularly the love between she and Yiannis. When the two come together, she can see he is in agony. She discovers more secrets as she searches for answers and as the tale draws to a close, we learn what respect is owed, what sacrifices are made and that when you’re invisible it is all too easy for evil doers to snuff you out. Whose to blame?

Read the Author’s Note at the end to understand the inspiration for this novel, it is truly giving voice to domestic workers. While this is fiction, it is reality based horror and begs the question, where is our humanity. Songbirds is a perfect title, the women themselves are just as trapped, unable to fly away into free lives. Important read.

Published August 3, 2021

Random House

Ballantine Books

ONE SENTENCE SUMMARY: A young woman leaves her native country, Sri Lanka hoping to provide for a better future for the daughter she leaves behind.

BRIEF REVIEW: Nisha works as a housekeeper and a nanny for a wealthy widow and her daughter in Cyprus. She left her own two year old daughter, Kumari with her mother in Sri Lanka in hopes that someday she could return home and give her daughter a better life. By day Nisha works as a domestic worker for Petra and cares for Petra's nine year old daughter Aliki. Although Nisha chats with her daughter via an iPad in the evenings, she is, for the most part, treated like nothing more than a servant by Petra.

Yiannis is a poacher who makes a lot of money by trapping tiny songbirds and sells them on the black market where they are considered a delicacy. He lives on Petra's property and is also Nisha's secret lover. He longs to marry her and give her a better life but, poaching is a tough job to get out of once you are part of the illegal operation. Nisha hates what he must do to the tiny birds.

When Nisha goes missing one evening, after preparing dinner, early in the story, it's Petra who begins her own investigation with the help of Yiannis. She begins talking with other migrant workers as when a migrant, especially a woman, goes missing in Cyprus, the police are not helpful.

I don't want to say too much more about the story except to say it is beautifully written, full of symbolism and imagery and just unforgettable, yet heartbreaking as well. The story in part was based on the true disappearances of other migrant women in Cyprus. There were some upsetting details involving how the poachers trap the tiny songbirds and what they do to them afterward. Despite this, I'm so happy I had a chance to read this book. I now want to read the author's previous book: The Beekeeper of Aleppo which is supposed to be excellent as well.

Thanks go to Ballantine Books for sending me a finished copy of this thought-provoking book in exchange for my unbiased review.

RATING: 4.5/5

Memorable Quotes:

“You see, when you clump people together and don’t understand their personal stories, you can make up any bullshit and convince yourself it’s the truth.”

“Now that I could hear this woman’s song—a melody that told a story I couldn’t understand—I hoped with all of my heart that it wasn’t too late.”
https://bibliophilebythesea.blogspot.com/2021/08/2021-songbirds-christy-lefteri.html

TL;DR REVIEW:

I liked Songbirds, although The Beekeeper of Aleppo is still my favorite of Lefteri’s. Still, I think this book does good things and will appeal to lots of different types of readers.

For you if: You want fast-paced contemporary fiction with beautiful sentences and a substantive topic.

FULL REVIEW:

First, thank you to Ballantine for the digital review copy of this book!

I jumped at the chance to read this one after loving Lefteri’s The Beekeeper of Aleppo, which won the 2020 Aspen Words literary prize. While I still think Beekeeper is my favorite of the two, Songbirds was a moving, well-written novel with good characters and plenty of momentum.

Inspired by true events, Songbirds takes place in Cyprus and starts when a Sri Lankan domestic worker named Nisha disappears. The novel is told in alternating points of view between Yiannis, her boyfriend, who is also trying to extricate himself from an underground poaching operation; and Petra, her employer, a single mother who takes it upon herself to search for Nisha (and begins to peel back a fog of grief and layers of her privilege as she does).

So on the one hand, this book is a tender depiction of the erasure and strife of immigrant domestic workers in this part of the world; on the other, it’s a mystery: what happened to Nisha? I think a lot of different types of readers will like it. Petra’s journey uncovering her own prejudice occasionally feels elementary, but I appreciated the way it intersected with her grief as a widow and her resulting struggle as a mother. I also wanted to shake Yiannis, but despite his weakness he does have an inherently good heart. Lefteri’s sentences are really beautiful, and the audiobook (which features two voice actors for our two narrators) was well done.

I think this book could be a good gateway novel if you’re looking to move from mystery/thriller genre fiction into a more contemporary fiction space, or it could be a good quick read with teeth if you spend most of your time in literary fiction. I’m glad I read it.



CONTENT WARNINGS:
Animal cruelty and killing (poaching); Racism and intense xenophobia/prejudice; Miscarriage (graphic); Abduction

A very powerful story shedding light in the plight of migrant domestic workers in Cyprus. Nisha, a nanny from SriLanka, falls in love with a songbird poacher named Yiannis - we discover the many losses in her life - her sister, her husband, and leaving her young daughter to go into service so she could provide for her, a sad and tragic story based on the real murders of five maids and two of their children in Cyprus. Sadly the police and authorities never investigated the missing women allowing the murderer to claim more victims. I was also in the dark about the songbird poachers and shocked at the lucrative business it is. A great book club choice - thank you to NetGalley for an advance reader copy.

"Songbirds" by Christy Lefteri, was a beautiful, sad, and honest novel about the vulnerability and disregard of immigrant workers. This story takes place in Cyprus, and spans many countries of origin. A melancholy love story of loss, disappeared person, loyalty, and the ugly treatment of humans. Thank you NetGalley, author and publisher for the copy for review. All opinions are my own.

Exceptionally moving novel that spotlights the harms of a practice that most people don't even like to think about. I can seriously say that in all my years of reading, I've encountered maybe one entire other work of fiction that's addressed this issue with honesty and compassion, Ovidia Yu's terrific <a href="https://www.criminalelement.com/review-meddling-and-murder-by-ovidia-yu/">Meddling And Murder</a>. That said, both MaM and Songbirds are superlative novels about modern slavery under the guise of domestic work, and both deserve to be widely read and lauded.

Whereas MaM was a much more lighthearted take on the subject, however, Songbirds goes straight for the jugular, telling the tale of domestic servant Nisha Jayakody from the perspectives of both her employer Petra and her lover Theo. When Nisha abruptly disappears one Sunday night, neither Petra nor Theo knows what to think. Nine years earlier, a recently widowed and heavily pregnant Petra hired Nisha via a domestic agency. Since then, Nisha has looked after Petra and raised Petra's daughter Aliki while virtually raising her own daughter Kumari back in Sri Lanka via Internet. Petra, though a Cypriot, is fairly typical of the kind of woman world-wide who hires domestic help from the poorer countries of Asia. She doesn't really think about Nisha as a person, merely as a tool; she at least has the crushing grief of losing her husband right before the birth of their daughter as an excuse.

Theo is a much less conventional character. A former banker who lost his career, savings and wife in the last economic collapse, he now rents the apartment over Petra's house and works as a forager, ostensibly, to pay the bills. What he actually does is poach migratory songbirds, an illegal if lucrative enterprise. He and Nisha have been together for almost two years, with her sneaking away to meet him upstairs while Petra and Aliki sleep. Theo wants to marry Nisha, but when she reacts badly to discovering his secret life as a poacher, he fears he may have lost her, even before she vanishes.

At first, Petra feels inconvenienced and annoyed by Nisha's absence, but as the days go by and Aliki shows her that Nisha's most valued items are still in their house, she begins to worry for real. The cops laugh at her when she tries to report Nisha as a missing person however, claiming that maids run away all the time and she should just find a replacement. Indignant at their callousness towards someone she'd never really thought about as an individual herself before, she's further thrown when Theo breaks down and comes asking after Nisha. Maids aren't supposed to have romantic relationships, and Petra recognizes that if she'd known about the two of them, she'd have automatically dismissed her servant, never mind how integral Nisha's been to her household this past decade. To Petra's credit, she understands that this is a shitty reaction, so she and Theo join forces to find the missing woman, even as they come up against all of society's ugliest attitudes to the indentured.

So, background time: I'm from Malaysia, where it's common for the relatively well-off to hire foreign maids who, quite frankly, are treated like slaves. They get one day off a week if they're lucky, and are expected to work up to twenty hours a day otherwise. Often, their passports and other personal documents are confiscated so they don't run away. They're expected to spend their entire lives devoted to their employers, enduring whatever abuse is thrown their way, often without any way to protect themselves, seek redress or choose better working conditions. Agencies are predatory, claiming large debts that the maids can only pay off after long years of drudgery. The only upside for them is that they can send more money to their loved ones back home than they could make in their homelands.

Sure, slavery is better than starvation, but what kind of monster actively helps perpetuate either system?

Tho my family could have afforded a foreign maid, we declined, choosing instead to hire local staff to come in several times a week at fair wages. Shanthi cleaned our house but we also visited hers for Deepavali, and I played with her daughter (and we ran away from racist kids who asked why I, a Malay child, would play with an Indian girl.) It was very much an employer-employee relationship, the kind that my best friend's family also had with their more numerous local staff, and very different from having an obsequious live-in servant, like some of our extended family had. It just didn't feel right to have someone so much in our power, didn't feel right to ask so much of anyone. And as I got older and learned how these women are treated, how, if we're being honest, any impoverished foreign nationals imported specifically for menial labor are too often treated, I felt a great revulsion for anyone who buys into the system without keeping in mind, first and foremost, that workers are as much human beings as employers are.

Christy Lefteri thoroughly understands this position, understanding too that her privilege, like mine, means that we need to be allies to domestic workers, and that it's more compassionate -- and, for being lived in, more powerful -- for women like us to write stories like these from our perspectives instead of claiming to represent something we don't. Her book clearly elucidates a worldwide class (and often race and sex) problem as seen by people who never really questioned the exploitative system but slowly learn to abhor it. It's not that either Ms Lefteri or I think that people don't need helpers, or that migrants don't need jobs. It's that the system is in dire need of regulation, with protections for workers and punishments for abusers. Because it isn't just the rapists and sadists who need to be checked, tho those monsters certainly need to be prosecuted for their crimes and barred from ever employing servants again. It's that even people who consider themselves "normal" bosses will think there's nothing wrong with denying employees personal lives or expecting greater than eighty hour work weeks with tightly circumscribed "breaks" that they would never accept for themselves.

And that's what lies at the heart of the problem, that this modern-day slavery depends on people refusing to see the humanity in others, in not living by the Golden Rule. Ms Lefteri has written a moving, passionate plea for people with political power -- ordinary people, really, like you and me -- to reconsider their attitude to the abuses of this system. Based on true events, Songbirds highlights a shocking global problem that doesn't need to be left the way it is, if only people would treat others the way they'd want to be treated themselves.

Songbirds by Christy Lefteri was published August 3 2021 by Ballantine Books and is available from all good booksellers, including <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/15382/9780593238042">Bookshop!</a>

As powerful as her book The Beekeeper of Aleppo, Songbirds by Christy Lefteri draws the reader’s attention to the racism and struggles of low-paid immigrants in Cyprus. After leaving her daughter in her native Sri Lanka, Nisha came to Cyprus to find work. As a widow, her choices of employment were limited, and she was one of the lucky ones. She found work as housekeeper and nanny when Petra, an optometrist hired her to look after her baby daughter. Petra, too, was a widow. Nisha finds a lover in the upstairs renter, Yiannis. When Nisha vanishes one night, the police show little concern about her disappearance and its up to Petra and Yiannis to find out what happened to Nisha. There’s no happy ending for immigrants forced to leave their homeland to provide financial security for their families. They have no voice, they have no way to stand up for themselves.

This was a long awaited read for me, and I'm so grateful to have been given this copy. The Beekeeper of Aleppo left me speechless, and Songbirds that it again! It has some similar things and will tug at all the same heartstrings. Read this!

Wow, just wow. I loved The Beekeeper of Aleppo and was initially disappointed that Songbirds was going a different direction with the missing person/mystery plotline.. I was afraid of losing some of the emotional connection to the characters and the genuine look at the migrant experience. Boy, was I wrong.

I couldn’t have been more vested in these characters, and that happened very early. I learned about both Cyprus and the plight of too many migrant domestic workers around the globe. More than learning, I felt. My heart broke. I cried real tears. I was gutted.

Read. This. Book.

Thank you to Christi Lefteri, Ballantine Books, and NetGalley for an Advance Reader Copy in exchange for an honest review.