Aug 15

Aug 15 Songbirds

Author: Christy Lefteri
Publisher: Ballantine
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

From the prize-winning author of The Beekeeper of Aleppo, a stunning novel about the disappearance of a Sri Lankan nanny and how the most vulnerable people find their voices.

It began with a crunch of leaves and earth. So early, so cold, the branches shone with ice. I'd returned to collect the songbirds. They are worth more than their weight in gold.

Yiannis is a poacher, trapping the tiny protected songbirds that stop in Cyprus as they migrate each year from Africa to Europe and selling them on the black market. He dreams of finding a new way of life, and of marrying Nisha, who works on the island as a nanny and maid—having left her native Sri Lanka to try to earn enough to support her daughter, left behind and raised by relatives.

But Nisha has vanished; one evening, she steps out on a mysterious errand and doesn't return. The police write off her disappearance as just another runaway domestic worker, so her employer, Petra, undertakes the investigation.

Petra's unravelling of Nisha's last days in Cyprus lead her to Nisha's friends—other maids in the neighborhood—and to the darker side of a migrant's life, where impossible choices leave them vulnerable, captive, and worse.

Based on the real-life disappearance of domestic workers in Cyprus, Christy Lefteri has crafted a poignant, deeply empathetic narrative of the human stories behind the headlines. With infinite tenderness and skill, Songbirds offers a triumphant story of the fight for truth and justice, and of women reclaiming their lost voices.

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.