Book 85: H is for Hawk

I remember Book 85 H is for Hawk coming out in about 2014 and winning the Costa Award. I probably picked it up in Waterstones and decided not to read it at some point. The library challenge has given me a second chance.

It's a bit of a strange mixture to be honest. Helen Macdonald's grief about her father's loss and her throwing herself into training a new hawk I can just about get. There was also quite a bit about an obscure long dead writer called T H White who had written about hawks in the past and which I just found an irritation. She read book by him and others when she was a kid but it doesn't really add much to this memoir IMHO.

I was quite interested in the parts about Mable the hawk and training her but there was just too much other stuff that cluttered the novel for me.

It's probably my failing, rather than the author's, this book was just a bit too abstract for my literal scientific mind.

Anyway it gets 5/10.