Well this one’s a heartbreaker! I’m so torn about how I feel about this beautifully written novel, purely because of the level of animal cruelty in it which I really struggled with.
When Nisha, a Sri Lankan nanny living in Cyprus, disappears one night, her employer Petra and her partner Yiannis begin to worry. It’s just not like Nisha, who adores the little girl she looks after and needs the money to send home to her own daughter and family. The police refuse to investigate foreign workers, even as there are more disappearances of women working in Cyprus. Then Yiannis finds out that Nisha was planning on meeting with the man who he poaches Songbirds with on the night of her disappearance, and suddenly he doesn’t know what to believe…
This is a stunning story - the setting, the food, the song of the birds and the writing are incredibly evocative and took me on a journey. However what took this from a four star read to three for me, was the level of detail around the cruelty of the way they trap and kill these birds - I just couldn’t stomach it and had to skip huge chunks of text. I wish it had been alluded to rather than spelt out like it was, but that’s just me - I can handle anything but the animal brutality 🙈
That being said, it’s also an incredibly romantic, intriguing and suspenseful story which I had to continue reading as I was so invested in these characters. I liked the dual narrative of Petra and Yiannis, who both held such different points of view, and of the way Nisha’s disappearance opened Petra’s eyes to how little care Nisha and the other foreign workers have in Cyprus. It was incredibly thought provoking to see how much these women do every day without complaint, simply to try to care for their families back home, and it was devastating to see how taken advantage of they were. There’s a powerful message within the story.
When Nisha, a Sri Lankan nanny living in Cyprus, disappears one night, her employer Petra and her partner Yiannis begin to worry. It’s just not like Nisha, who adores the little girl she looks after and needs the money to send home to her own daughter and family. The police refuse to investigate foreign workers, even as there are more disappearances of women working in Cyprus. Then Yiannis finds out that Nisha was planning on meeting with the man who he poaches Songbirds with on the night of her disappearance, and suddenly he doesn’t know what to believe…
This is a stunning story - the setting, the food, the song of the birds and the writing are incredibly evocative and took me on a journey. However what took this from a four star read to three for me, was the level of detail around the cruelty of the way they trap and kill these birds - I just couldn’t stomach it and had to skip huge chunks of text. I wish it had been alluded to rather than spelt out like it was, but that’s just me - I can handle anything but the animal brutality 🙈
That being said, it’s also an incredibly romantic, intriguing and suspenseful story which I had to continue reading as I was so invested in these characters. I liked the dual narrative of Petra and Yiannis, who both held such different points of view, and of the way Nisha’s disappearance opened Petra’s eyes to how little care Nisha and the other foreign workers have in Cyprus. It was incredibly thought provoking to see how much these women do every day without complaint, simply to try to care for their families back home, and it was devastating to see how taken advantage of they were. There’s a powerful message within the story.