4thace reviewed H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
Review of 'H Is for Hawk' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
It is a story with grief always just beyond the edges of the page, as the author and her goshawk train one another how to live. Nothing comes easily at the outset, least of which the awareness of exactly why she has set herself to this notoriously difficult task. She has interspersed her narrative of the months together with Mabel with accounts of T. H. White's memoir The Goshawk. And sometimes the wings of the birds bring to mind the wings of the airplanes the author's late father would sit up for hours to spot during his youth. There is much suffering, and not just among the raptor's quarry, some of it avoidable, some of it not. The writing is lyrical in parts, brutal when it needs to be, spare and powerful overall.
