I felt incomplete unless the hawk was sitting on my hand: we were parts of each other. Grief and the hawk had conspired to this strangeness. I trusted she would fly to me as simply and completely as I trusted gravity would make things fall. And so entrenched was this sense that the hawk flying to me was part of the workings of the world that when things went wrong, the world went wrong with it.

This is one of those titles that was recommended to me over and over again. I've always loved memoirs but...natural history? Would that be something I'd enjoy? I wasn't entirely sure what to expect but I'm incredibly grateful to everyone who urged me to read this because it is truly brilliant.

When Helen's father suddenly dies, she is staggered by the overwhelming weight of her grief and so becomes set on training a goshawk, a bird notoriously difficult to tame - enter Mabel. As Helen's understanding of this intense creature grows, her sense of self begins to deteriorate as the lines between human and animal begin to blur, and as she further submerges herself into the life of late author, T.H White, and his book Gos, in which he details his own experiences training a goshawk.

H is for Hawk is part memoir, part natural history, part literary criticism, which sounds like it shouldn't work but it does - and does so beautifully. Macdonald's grief for her father is palpable on the page, it is as though she has handed it to you so you can really understand how heavy it is and how unbearable it is to carry. Sometimes she hits you with these small moments where you feel the entire impact of it, like in this moment here:

When I was writing the speech, still a little concussed, I reached for the phone to call my father and ask what type of plane it was, and for a moment the world went very black.

It's a brief, simple moment that we've all read about before, this terrible instant when we forget that someone is no longer there and how all the pain of that loss breaks anew again. The way she writes about her father and the memories she has of him is incredibly touching and is never overdone or out of place. In spite of talking about three large subjects all at once (grief - nature - writer), they never overlap in a way that feels irrelevant, in fact they all become integral to one another. Blurred lines is incredibly prevalent in this book, as Helen begins to merge her experience of the world with Mabel's, and there are many instances where she writes as though they are one being or so inextricably attached that one cannot exist without the other, like in the quote I highlighted at the beginning of this review.

I truly loved the way Helen writes about animals - her descriptions of Mabel and birds in general were not only beautiful to read but completely changed how I perceived them myself. There is a wonderful passage where she is picking up Mabel for the first time and she is at first given a different goshawk:

Everything about this second hawk was different. She came out like a Victorian melodrama: a sort of madwoman in the attic. She was smokier and darker and much, much bigger, and instead of twittering, she wailed; great awful gouts of sound like a thing in pain, and the sound was unbearable.

What a description.

I found the sections on T.H White also fascinating, although I would probably say that they were my least favourite parts to read about. I still found them interesting and they made me curious to learn more but, like a young Helen, I found his treatment of Gos quite distressing to read about. I don't think I'll be picking up Gos anytime soon.

I walk away from H is for Hawk curious to explore more natural history works, and with a greater appreciation for birds in general, which I wasn't really expecting. I learned and felt a lot while reading this book and I think it'll be one I think about for a long time.