Birdsong Review

Birdsong is a short story written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Adichie is a Nigerian author born in 1977. She attended the University of Nigeria where she studied medicine for 18 months before studying communications and political science at Drexel University and Eastern Connecticut State University. She then completed a master's degree in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University.

The story Birdsong is about a woman who has an affair with a married man. The author's descriptive style really brings the story to life. My favorite part to read was the following, on the second page in the online version on www.newyorker.com.

"When I stepped out of the car, I felt as though I had stumbled into a secret garden. A dense mass of periwinkles, white and pink, bordered the walkway to the house. The air was clean here, even fragrant, and there was something about it all that made me think of renewal." 

-Birdsong by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

She is so descriptive of the look, the smell and even the feeling of the place. The style she uses to describe the house was so realistic that I felt like I was in front of the house experience the view, smell and feeling.

One critique I would give is on the pacing of the story. I felt like she went off on a couple tangents and I felt myself a little bit lost in the text. Every time she referred back to the beginning part of the story, she did make a new paragraph which made it easy to follow but she didn't end them in context. A lot of times she would melt the two tenses together in one paragraph which isn't necessarily bad but I found it hard to follow.

Overall, Birdsong was a good read and I would definitely recommend it. It was published in The New Yorker on September 20th, 2010. You can find it in the magazine or online at www.newyorker.com