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A review by meggoes
H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

dark emotional reflective relaxing sad slow-paced

3.5

It took me approximately 2 months to finish this book, when normally I can finish one of this length in a couple days.  I am out of practice with reading physical books, and this one was not exactly a page turner nor an easy read.  The verbiage and analysis in this book was really challenging to me.  

I looked up the definitions of many, many words (a la "argillaceous"), but the flow of the text was generally soothing if I didn't stress about specifics.  

Likewise, I frequently got lost in what, exactly, the author was getting at with descriptions of White, the author of Goshawk and The Sword and the Stone who is apparently known for his incredible incompetence with his first bird, Gos, who he
eventually lost and never recovered
.

White, to me, is not a loveable character (or person, I guess).  Probably partly as a result of the abuse he suffered as a gay man in a severely homophobic society, so I don't exactly fault him for that.  A miserable, lost, prideful person with violent and unsettling desires. 
I'm glad that White added a post-script to The Goshawk detailing his failings and what he should have done with Gos.  I find it interesting and not exactly unreasonable that one of the responses the book got was of outrage and despair from a fellow hawk lover.


With all that said, I appreciated the way this book deals with grief in general.  The author's loss is a major part of the story, of how she ended up with a hawk at all, but I felt drawn out of the grief and loss by the distraction of her adventure with the hawk.  Which was the point, I think.  It was why she got the hawk at all, as a means to distract from the pain she was feeling (I think -- my critical analysis muscles feel very weak and my faulty memory doesn't help).

Chapter 11 made me laugh out loud and also cry at different moments.  The emotional whiplash of a single chapter was something special, to me.
There was a typo on page 206 -- "them them"
The injury Helen suffered at her own hand while quickly butchering a pheasant is almost exactly like the injury my sister suffered (albeit by the blade of an unguarded mandolin slicer).
The last couple lines seemed like Helen saying goodbye to her father, "'I will miss you'...there was no reply, there was nothing to explain." and then leaning into the comfort of community as a means to heal.  Immediately after saying goodbye to her hawk, she joins Tony in his house where it is warm and lovely.  It almost felt anti-climactic...but the more I thought about it the more I appreciated the ending.  Grief and loss have no real end.  Life just keeps going.


I think this is a great book and I understand why it is so acclaimed.  I did enjoy it, despite finding it a bit challenging in multiple ways.  I think that whenever I suffer a loss as deep as a father, I will pick up this book again and find incredible solace in it.  Until then, I have no interest in re-reading this book.
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