H Is for Hawk

Helen Macdonald 2014

Devastation Rating

Emotionally Ruined
grief hawks nature memoir

Our Take

Macdonald's father dies and she buys a goshawk and moves into the grief of training it. The bird's ferocity is the anger she cannot express; the process of falconry is the discipline that keeps her here. T.H. White appears throughout — another writer undone by hawks and loneliness — and the parallel is devastating.

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