H is for Hawk is the story of one woman’s grief for her father, told through the lens of an adventure in falconry. In an attempt to process her father’s sudden death, Helen MacDonald adopted and trained a goshawk. It had been a personal goal of hers for many years - her fascination with hawks started when she was around 9. And thus she adopted her hawk, named Mabel, and began the long and painful process of domesticating a hawk, training it to fly and return, and finally to hunt.

As far as the narrative is concerned, Mabel’s training seems to go quite well - she becomes a calm and even playful hawk, a loyal companion, a reasonably good hunter. That much we can read between the lines of the prose, but what Mabel symbolizes for Macdonald is another question. The hawk symbolizes death; it reminds the author of her father; it is feral and unpredictable like her own grief; it harkens back to hawks of antiquity and all of the ancient folklore surrounding them. Mabel, in short, has been overloaded with all of the messy, complicated feelings that are a part of the grieving process.

More than that, Mabel is a launchpad for probing inquiries into a hundred different subjects, ranging from the etymology of the jargon of falconry to an explication of an art gallery exhibit centered on the California condor. More than that, Mabel is the literary descendant of Gos, the hawk whose training is described woefully in TH White’s The Goshawk. Macdonald overtly compares her own adventure to that of White’s, and she interweaves a biography of White with her own memoir. This structure makes the book all the more compelling; the reader gets not only a view into one woman’s deep feeling of grief, but a sidelong view into a long-ago writer’s own feelings of loneliness and self-worth.

It is difficult to make out quite which narrative voice to trust in this work. The Macdonald who was living through the grieving process was a bit of a wreck at that time; reading between the lines, it becomes obvious that she was just barely managing to hold on to functional life. In more ways than one she used her time with Mabel as a vehicle to escape the larger world. On the other hand - this episode clearly helped her recover from a difficult time, with enough presence of mind to write a fascinating book. So while the book is written in the present tense, almost as though we are reading from a diary, it has clearly benefited from a healthy dose of hindsight.

H is for Hawk is probably not a good how-to manual for those seeking to overcome grief (though it sounds as though it is a rather interesting manual for falconers.) But it is a fascinating work, and a rewarding read on many different levels.