H is for Hawk
After her father's sudden death, Macdonald trained a goshawk named Mabel and wrote a book that is simultaneously a grief memoir, a falconry manual, and a literary biography of T.H. White. The combination shouldn't work. It works completely. Won the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book of the Year because nobody could figure out which category it belonged in.
The T.H. White chapters draw the most repeated complaint: readers call the biography a book report grafted onto her memoir, present in nearly every chapter, and say they wanted more of her and less of him. Several object that a stranger she never met gets more page time than her own father, whose death is the book's stated reason for existing. One reader flatly writes, “more biographical information on White than there is about Macdonald,” and another dismisses the whole thread as “needless, soporific distraction from her own fascinating story.” A cluster of readers also never buys the ethics of keeping a wild predator for her own psychological benefit; one says “celebrating the caging/drilling of animals always makes me cringe.” Others report a strong opening that loses steam, admitting “finishing the book seemed more like a chore than a pleasure.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
