H is for Hawk

There's so much going on in this book. Helen, a historian and falconry enthusiast, is grieving the death of her father. In her grief, she arranges to buy and train a goshawk. In the course of working with her hawk, she reflects on the life of T.H. White, the writer of The Once and Future King and another book, The Goshawk, which haunts her. There are the stories of her and her father, stories about T.H. White and his struggles, and the story of Helen and her hawk in the present. All of these are braided together in a memoir that is more than a memoir.

There is more than a little melodrama here. In a book where death and grief are so central, it's not surprising, but at times it was painful to read about the turmoil of T.H. White and then witness, in a way, the turmoil of Helen. Thankfully relief does come, along with some startling insights about the human relationship to the wild.