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timeywriter 's review for:
H Is for Hawk
by Helen Macdonald
I'm going to be entirely honest here and say that I was way more excited to read this book than I was actually reading it. I had such high hopes for this acclaimed book and I just felt like it fell short in so many areas. Without a doubt, this was a splendid journey of a woman taming a goshawk in the wake of her father's death. It is both spiritual and eye opening in all matters of life and of the grieving process. I greatly enjoyed that the story seemed closer to fiction than nonfiction in its familiarity and the sense of ease the writing took.
I believe what fell short for me were the moments where the author T.H. White's own experiences in attempting to tame a goshawk are included. I was often confused as to this inclusion as time and again Macdonald rebuked him and his training methods. For a time it seemed that White's examples were a what not to do when training a goshawk while Macdonald offered a better perspective with her own experience. Yet, this did not always seem the case, other times White was used as a learning device, a comparison, and in the end it seemed that Macdonald praised his work The Sword and the Stone more so than anything else even when his work The Goshawk was the primary example. Really, what truly got me with the use of White were the times Macdonald wrote of his experiences as if she was him, that it was a first person perspective of his life. It was just strange, as if Macdonald both hated how White trained his goshawk and yet she also adored him for the influence he had on her childhood as she read his works growing up.
I believe the heart of this novel was about Macdonald's period of grief following the death of her father and how training a goshawk not only influenced those stages but also helped her to find happiness again. Honestly, if she had stuck more to that aspect and not puttered away with the White analogies then perhaps it would not have felt so jumbled to me. In the end though, I truly believe that this story found its stride and it made me see hawks in a different way. You know, as playful things that play catch with paper balls.
I believe what fell short for me were the moments where the author T.H. White's own experiences in attempting to tame a goshawk are included. I was often confused as to this inclusion as time and again Macdonald rebuked him and his training methods. For a time it seemed that White's examples were a what not to do when training a goshawk while Macdonald offered a better perspective with her own experience. Yet, this did not always seem the case, other times White was used as a learning device, a comparison, and in the end it seemed that Macdonald praised his work The Sword and the Stone more so than anything else even when his work The Goshawk was the primary example. Really, what truly got me with the use of White were the times Macdonald wrote of his experiences as if she was him, that it was a first person perspective of his life. It was just strange, as if Macdonald both hated how White trained his goshawk and yet she also adored him for the influence he had on her childhood as she read his works growing up.
I believe the heart of this novel was about Macdonald's period of grief following the death of her father and how training a goshawk not only influenced those stages but also helped her to find happiness again. Honestly, if she had stuck more to that aspect and not puttered away with the White analogies then perhaps it would not have felt so jumbled to me. In the end though, I truly believe that this story found its stride and it made me see hawks in a different way. You know, as playful things that play catch with paper balls.