To Read & To Write

"A woman in one village had the Sight and predicted doom. There were always such stories somewhere; natural philosophy was still the province of the rich and educated. The poor would have their gods of tree and stream and hollow, their hedgerow cures and charms. But those things were not usually tossed about in tavern gossip. For them to come out now meant fear of something else that was too hard to face. He had seen the hex signs, the wardings, on the farmhouse doors and the roofs of barns. On the sides of the roads were little primitive pyramids of stone for guarding and shrines with offerings of food. People expected evil. It made no sense, not even accounting for the uneasiness the dragons cast... it was the newness of it, he decided, made from raw fear and not unthinking custom." (p. 8, 10) Anne Leonard's Moth and Spark  (2014) tells a saga of old magic's renewal in desperate times of unknowing and obscured discernment within the kingdom of Caithen, a co...

Read my first review of H is for Hawk at this link:  https://feliciareviewsbooks.blogspot.com/2019/09/h-is-for-hawk-by-helen-macdonald.html When I read H is for Hawk for the first time, I was mesmerized by the tale of a human coming into contact with something wild and violent, the hawk. I knew that she, writer Helen MacDonald, was different than others who've told this story in that her story was not about the capturing of a hawk for scientific purposes, but rather a story about the experience of making of a bridge between two worlds that coincide in reality: the first, that of civilization, the second, that of the wilderness. At first reading, I was fascinated by her hawk Mabel and the relationship she shared with her owner, a relationship that can only be called such because of immense amounts of patience, expertise and knowledge, compromise, and dedication. To take care of and gain the trust of any wild animal is difficult, but a hawk especially. This mesmerizing effect a...

The title is “H Is For Hawk” because, like in those children’s picture books in which C is for cat and M is for mouse (and on and on), the hawk is an animal. And the underlying question is *what, exactly, is a hawk*? What does it look like, what does it do, where does it come from, how does it live? In her novel “H Is For Hawk” (2014) Helen MacDonald writes about the field of falconry (her profession) and readers learn answers to those questions about hawks. Her narrative answers those questions in different ways. Partly through her uncanny fascination with the famous T.H. White (author of “The Once and Future King” and a lesser known book, “The Goshawk”) and her experiences while reclaiming her life after her father, her guiding light, suddenly passes. It is a goshawk, one of the deadliest kinds of hawk, she connects to afterwards: “There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realize that is not how it will be at...

I laughed out loud, hard, a few times while reading this amazing book of poetry. I read the poems out loud too, in disbelief of the striking truth of the words, and the sadness within them as well. Everyone who has ever had to grow up will most probably be very moved by this book, especially those who have some knowledge of fairy tales. In them are words that reveal the ridiculousness of the image of "beauty" imposed on us in modern times, the tragedy of awful, selfish people that come off as being our friends, or worse, our best friends or our boyfriends, and the trauma that comes with being a teenager in a society that values outsides rather than insides and lust over love. There are more mysterious poems included as well that ask... who am I... *really*? After reading "Poisoned Apples: Poems For You My Pretty", you just might want to take the advice the author, Christine Heppermann, gives at the end: "Retell your own stories. Keep pushing your way throug...

“At least two kinds of courage are required in aging and sickness. The first is the courage to confront the reality of mortality – the courage to seek out the truth of what is to be feared and what is to be hoped. Such courage is difficult enough. We have many reasons to shrink from it. But even more daunting is the second kind of courage – the courage to act on the truth we find. The problem is that the wise course is so frequently unclear. For a long while, I thought that this was simply because of uncertainty. When it is hard to know what will happen, it is hard to know what to do. But the challenge, I’ve come to see, is more fundamental than that. One has to decide whether one’s fears or one’s hopes are what should matter most." - Atul Gawande The value of reading “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End” (2014) is in the disclosure of one special surgeon’s experiences, trials, and research. Today, there is the tendency to to take for granted that death is a pa...