Book Mole Larry Bowlden reviews Songbirds, a beautiful, awful book about women who leave their homes to travel to foreign lands for work. Like the songbirds that are captured in mist nets or on lime sticks and eaten as a delicacy, these women leave their own children behind so they can earn money to send back home. Working as domestic servants indentured to the agencies that provide travel expenses in exchange for lives of servitude, these workers, mostly women, are caught in a net of poverty and desperation. The metaphor of captured birds works well to describe their lives and struggles. The author, Christy Lefteri, is the child of Cypriot refugees and writes with a burning intensity both about the horrible practice of illegally poaching songbirds and the forced servitude of refugee workers.
- KBOO