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I do not read enough non-fiction. When I come to a book like this one, it makes me wonder why. Helen Macdonald has written a marvelous chronicle of her journey from grief to acceptance, achieved through the training of a goshawk.

When Helen loses her father, she loses her stability. He has been her friend and mentor, and in many ways she has patterned her life after his. The loss seems insurmountable. Having a background in and love of falconry, she decides to get a goshawk from a breeder in Ireland and train the hawk to hunt. Her true purpose, besides the training of the hawk, is to lose herself in the activity and life of the bird and cease to feel her own sorrow and loss.

Parallel to Helen's story, she tells us the story of T. H. White, the author who wrote The Sword in the Stone, but also the author of The Goshawk. When Helen was quite young, she read The Goshawk and much of her interest in falconry was born there. What is interesting is that White was not detailing the proper way to train a hawk. Everything he does with his hawk is wrong. He is a master of mistakes and miscues.

As we get to know Helen and her hawk, Mabel, we also get to know White and his hawk, Gos. The comparison can be made in the training certainly, but there is much more at the heart of what both of these people expect to get from these wild creatures that they take into their lives. Helen is lost because she has been deprived suddenly of the man who figures most prominently in her life and White is trying to exorcise the demons that come from feeling a childhood abandonment and being homosexual in a world that neither understands nor wishes to understand homosexuality.

For those of you who know me at all, you will know that Merlin is one of the characters of literature that speaks to me personally. I have loved the idea of him since my own childhood. This book shed some light for me on why White's Merlyn (his spelling) is so different than the Merlin of legend and Mary Stewart. I found this part of the book particularly fascinating and it has inspired me to re-read White's The Once and Future King. I think I will bring something different to the read this time than I did before...thanks to Helen Macdonald.

If you have ever lost a father, or anyone you loved and respected, you will find much to hold on to here. If you have ever felt different, apart, or wondered at the part of you that is cruel or unkind or protective, you will find something to hold on to here. If you have ever thought you would like to soar with a bird, lose yourself in the wildness of nature or simply disappear, you will find something to speak to you here.

Reading this book was like opening a gift, wrapped in shiny tinsel and paper, and finding inside something you desperately wanted but did not know existed. Highly recommended.