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3.82 AVERAGE
3.82 AVERAGE
emotional
hopeful
reflective
medium-paced
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
I liked it but did not love it. The first half was excellent, but the last quarter or so started to become dull… I loved the mix of processing grief, falconry, and the parallels with T. H. White. But towards the end of the book, I wasn’t really gaining any new revelations and there didn’t seem to be much substantial development in the relationship between Helen and Mabel. The T. H. White parts became very boring. Idk. I may have liked it more if it ended a little sooner, perhaps shortly after successfully free flying.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death
I have had this book in my pile for some time, and have finally gotten around to it. It is excellent. This is, however, a very literary book--possibly not to everyone's taste. I was much surprised by the deep entanglement with Macdonald's story and that of T.H. White, about whom I knew little before reading this book. The author is deeply introspective and sees symbolic and metaphoric significance in everything around her. I was quite fascinated. And I now intend to go back and re-read White's work on King Arthur, which I have not read in decades.
hopeful
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced
Really liked it, but could have been just a little bit shorter.
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
slow-paced
informative
reflective
slow-paced
In memory of Nike, my aunt’s illegal pet kestrel when she was a child.
emotional
funny
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Part memoir (grieving the sudden loss of a father), part nature writing (hawks! I knew nothing about them!), and part biography of fantasy writer T.H. White (I also knew nothing about this man, other than that he wrote 'The Once and Future King' - but, interesting bloke indeed). No excess sentimentality here - just lovely writing on topics both otherworldly and altogether common. Very, very pleased with this, enough that it wholly gripped me (and I gripped it) throughout a few hours of tattooing, following which I ran home to pull out my NatGeo book on birds to actually figure out what a goshawk is -- which only made me think Ms Macdonald all the more awesome.