Songbirds by Christy Lefteri

 genre: contemporary fiction, womens issues

When Petra's nanny and maid, Nisha, wasn't in her bed one morning, Petra had no clue what might have happened.  She didn't know that she could ask her upstairs tenant, Yiannis, who knows Nisha much better than Petra would have believed.  Yiannis, a poacher, who steals songbirds from the sky but whose heart's shell is cracking - he is also missing Nisha but has no idea where to start looking.  In refugee-croweded Cyprus there is an endless supply of immigrant women willing to work for a pittance and the general feeling on the island is that these working women are flippant, flitting from place to place with no real care for anyone but themselves.  But the longer Nisha is gone, the more Petra realizes how very untrue this is and how desperately she wants to find the woman that lived with her for years but that she never really knew.

I picked this out knowing nothing about it.  It's endlessly sad and I almost gave it up once or twice because I was discouraged by the poaching and the desperation.  But every time I wanted to give up I thought to myself - these women need their story told.  I want and need to give my brain time to think about Nisha and other invisible women like her, whose hopes and dreams are just as poignant and important as my own.  A nanny, a maid, a waitress - in many parts of the world, the women who are willing to do these jobs do so at great cost to themselves so they can support their family back home in whatever impoverished or war torn circumstances they left behind.  These women deserve to be treated with dignity and this book really made me think about these things.  That being sad, though, it really is a hard sad book.  I really hated the poaching parts.  I know I'm a birder, so that makes me more sensitive to it, but it's an ugly world. Even with all that, though, I think this is a book whose characters will stay with me for a long time and I'm not sorry I stuck with it.