Raising Hare

Hi Bookworms, it was another tough week in news so I hope you’re hanging in there. As you can see the snow here has melted away and the fields are brown now. It’s awfully mild out West for February.

But things are gearing up with the Olympics on and it being Super Bowl Sunday. Will you be going to a S.B. party? I’ll likely be home and will watch sporadically from the couch … along with reading and checking in on the skating and skiing from the Olympics. Neither NFL team is a favorite, but there’s always the spectacle of the halftime show. 

Meanwhile you might have heard this past week the terrible news about the major layoffs at The Washington Post. Three hundred+ people were let go and the Book and Sports sections were discontinued along with various foreign bureaus. I once worked at this reputable newspaper, which was then owned by the Graham family. It was an impressive place with many great journalists. I worked there as a copy editor and left in November 2010. 

Jeff Bezos bought The Post in 2013 and has now gutted it … while recently his Amazon company spent $75 million in the making and promoting of the “Melania” documentary … all to cozy up to the current regime. It’s quite a blow to those who worked good portions of their careers at the paper as well as to its loyal readers and to democracy in general. Disturbingly, a free press is the first to go in a tyranny. It’s made me think back to those days in the 1990s and early 2000s when I was at The Post … and to the late Mrs. Graham who gave so much to the newspaper that published many important stories. I loved her Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography, which came out in 1997. 

And now, here’s the books I completed in January. It seems my reading benefited from it being a long month in the middle of winter with a bum recovering knee so I was on the couch more than usual. I pretty much liked all of these so it’s hard to say which was my favorite but I was especially pleased to have finished Shannon Bowring’s trilogy (with Tina at Turn the Page) and Edith Wharton’s autobiography written in 1934. So here they are in the last order finished:

• Before I Forget by Tory Henwood Hoen (debut, hardback)
• The Irish Goodbye by Heather Aimee O’Neill (debut, audiobook)
• In a Distant Valley by Shannon Bowring (audiobook, #3 in trilogy)
• The Ferryman and His Wife by Frode Grytten (paperback, translated)
• A Backward Glance by Edith Wharton (ebook, nonfiction) 
• The Wedding People by Alison Espach (audiobook) 
• When the Cranes Fly South (paperback, debut, translated) 

Lastly, here are a couple reviews below of what I finished lately. 

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton / Pantheon / 285 pages / 2025

This is my first 5 star book in a while. It might not be that for every reader but I’m sensitive to good animal stories and this nonfiction memoir was one of them. Although other bloggers had mentioned positive things about the book (thanks Deb at Readerbuzz), I didn’t really have any assumptions going into it. 

It has a straightforward premise about a woman, living in the countryside outside of London during the pandemic days who finds a wild newborn baby hare — a leveret apparently abandoned near her home. She thinks it will die so she takes to caring and feeding it. She lets it be wild and run in and out of her house into a courtyard garden. To raise it, she learns much in the process, and her and the hare go through a journey of sorts together. It’s a rare connection she gets to have with the hare and something you don’t see everyday. 

At the book’s beginning it seems to offload a lot of descriptive info about the particulars of hares and all the dangers to them and I didn’t think too much about the book for a while. The lady seems to have a high powered job as a political adviser and she think she doesn’t have the time or know one thing about such animals. She’s avid about her job and doesn’t know how or if caring for the leveret is going to work out. 

But as it goes on, her story sneaks up on you when after a couple cool things happen, you realize the trust and endearing magic of the cool connection she’s having to this wild animal. It pulls at the heartstrings a bit and I felt a bit weepy in parts. Along the way, the author and hare go through a transformation of sorts — the author learning and becoming more keen to the natural world, and the hare becoming bigger and more sure of itself.

I very much enjoyed the audio version read superbly by British actress Louise Brealey. By the end, this lovely story had its hooks (or paws?) in me. In dark times, we need more people keen and observant and caring as this woman becomes towards the hare and the natural world. It’s quiet dynamite.

Before I Forget by Tory Henwood Hoen / St. Martin’s / 288 pages / 2025

3.75 stars. This novel is an engaging coming-of-age kind of read about 26-year-old Cricket Campbell who leaves her life and job as an assistant at a Wellness company in NYC to return home and be her Dad’s caretaker in the Adirondacks. She hasn’t seen him in about nine years ever since she left at 16 when her boyfriend (Seth) was in an accident near their house and her parents divorced, which together left her reeling and later to drop out of college. 

Now she wants to reconcile with her 74-year-old father, but he has Alzheimer’s and it seems futile. Still moving back home to Catwalk Pond has its enjoyments amid nature and new friends, and she feels a purpose helping her father in his own rural environs. While there, she comes to believe that her father may be a bit clairvoyant and able to see ghosts. How this plays out for Cricket and those who come to seek her father’s advice is engaging to follow through to the end. 

The novel spoke to me a bit in remembering the care with my own parents. It’s an endearing story and set in a beautiful Adirondack location. You root for the protagonist Cricket — who’s riddled with guilt over her parents divorce and her teenage boyfriend’s accident— to find herself and give her purpose and the confidence to find what’s she wants to do with her life. It paints a picture of her dad’s Alzheimer’s that rings true but isn’t overly too harsh to read. Still it’s a bit sad though the resolution is satisfying. 

That’s all for now. What about you — have you read these and what did you think?