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3.82 AVERAGE
3.82 AVERAGE
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
reflective
sad
slow-paced
RIP T.H. White, you would have loved EMDR therapy.
Listened to this on audio. It was narrated by the author who has nice voice and a smooth British accent.
I liked this book and I wanted to love it, but ultimately I had to take away a star. This book has a lot going on. It's a book about falconing and hawks, but it is also a grief memoir recalling the period in the author's life when she struggled with the unexpected loss of her father. It also follows her experience as she trains her first goshawk named Mabel during that same time period. It's also partly a biography of T.H. White as she weaves in his life and works as they apply to her life and work.
It is beautifully written. Her descriptions of all the things she encounters and recalls, the English country side, the wildlife, her birds, her interactions with friends and herself. Her interpretations on T.H. White's tragic life and his attempts to train a goshawk similar to herself. She makes thoughtful, touching, and sometimes painful observations of the world through her eyes, the eyes of her hawk, and the eyes of T.H. White.
That being said, there were times when the book lost me. I would also find myself having trouble following timelines or staying with her as she talked on about things. I would find that at times it was a bit too much. I feel like it may have benefited to be slightly shorter.
But overall, I highly recommend this book. It was a wonderful read and a great audio book. Very touching and emotional and very well done.
I liked this book and I wanted to love it, but ultimately I had to take away a star. This book has a lot going on. It's a book about falconing and hawks, but it is also a grief memoir recalling the period in the author's life when she struggled with the unexpected loss of her father. It also follows her experience as she trains her first goshawk named Mabel during that same time period. It's also partly a biography of T.H. White as she weaves in his life and works as they apply to her life and work.
It is beautifully written. Her descriptions of all the things she encounters and recalls, the English country side, the wildlife, her birds, her interactions with friends and herself. Her interpretations on T.H. White's tragic life and his attempts to train a goshawk similar to herself. She makes thoughtful, touching, and sometimes painful observations of the world through her eyes, the eyes of her hawk, and the eyes of T.H. White.
That being said, there were times when the book lost me. I would also find myself having trouble following timelines or staying with her as she talked on about things. I would find that at times it was a bit too much. I feel like it may have benefited to be slightly shorter.
But overall, I highly recommend this book. It was a wonderful read and a great audio book. Very touching and emotional and very well done.
slow-paced
Beautifully written and narrated. A very unusual book, combining grief, an exploration of “gentlemanly” hawking in Britain, author TH White, and the author’s experience of raising Mabel. Read for a book club or I would never have read it.
Helen Macdonald has crafted a moving and poetic bool, weaving tales of falconry, their connection with their Goshawk Mabel, the grief experienced following the unexpected death of their father and a potted biography of T.H. White. It sounds like a lot but it's flows seamlessly between these areas, weaving their emotional crash through it all. Beautiful and stark, it portrays a difficult world which anyone can come unstuck from and the journey back to yourself. Worth reading.
I liked it but thought I'd like it a bit more. I learned some things about hawks, and falconry/hawking, and the life of TH White, but the overall emotional impact was curiously muted.
emotional
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
Given the awards this book has won and the praise it has received from critics, I expected it to be better than it was. It was not a bad book, but certainly not a 5-star book. While there is a lot of information about hawks and falconry and T.H. White, the book narrated by the protagonist fails to provide the level of introspection that would draw the reader into the narrator's world. The story is interesting, but leaves the reader sitting on the sidelines looking in.
I would never say this is a bad book, or tell anyone not to read it. There is some beautiful, deeply felt prose here. But I just don't think I'm the right reader to fully appreciate the book as a whole. The concept of "hawking" makes no sense to me (take a wild animal, tame it, and then teach it how to hunt--something that should come naturally to it? what??), and I didn't care one bit about the T.H. White sections (honestly, skimming/skipping those sections was the only way I could finish this).
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Masterful. Somehow better than her follow-up work which I read first last year. An amazing story of grief, desire, wild animals, and what it means to tame our own desires. A brilliant book that weaves the twin narratives of the loss of the author's father into her learning to fly a goshawk with a third narrative about T.H. White, his life, and his experiences flying a goshawk and writing his own book on the subject. A book bigger than any of its subjects that tries to reach for truth in the talons, beak, and wings of a raptor.