There is something both wonderfully archaic and utterly contemporary about Chloe Dalton’s memoir of finding and raising a baby hare ... One of the great glories of the book, beautifully illustrated by Denise Nestor, is the way in which Ms. Dalton records the appearance, movement and behavior of the growing leveret ... Dalton has given us a portrait, both ephemeral and real.
Meditative ... Plenty of hare lore and history are woven into the narrative, which Dalton delivers with meticulous descriptions and pragmatic sensibility ... To divulge much more of the book’s arc would rob the reader of its most revealing moments, especially as the hare matures and her priorities shift. But Dalton’s clear, measured prose and Denise Nestor’s delicate drawings provide a gentle cottagecore vibe and a bit of solace in a world that has now returned to an even more frenetic state.
A welcome addition to these stories of transformative, interspecies trust-building ... Filled with fascinating information gleaned from both close observation and research ... Lacking the expected, traditional narrative arc that ends in loss, its final chapters drag a bit. But Dalton’s paean to her 'wondrous,' life-changing communion with this animal offers many exquisite moments.
Fascinating ... She describes the leveret’s evolving behavior and body in painterly detail ... A plea for people to be gentler with other creatures, to grant them room to live.
Excellent ... Finely crafted ... This book’s urge to restore a sense of the sacred, to meet animals on their own terms, and rewild the human imagination.
There was a time, before the pandemic took her to the countryside, before a bitterly cold winter walk, when Chloe Dalton “knew nothing about hares and gave them little thought”. After a rural childhood, she carved out an urban, international existence as a political adviser. It is testament to the intelligence of her writing that she does not measure the urban against the rural and find it wanting. Eventually though, during lockdown, she itched to get back to the countryside (“I also knew that life could not stand still, and truthfully, I wanted and needed to go”).
Such threads of ambivalence run throughout the book, preventing the narrative from drifts towards cliché. On the February day when Dalton returns home clutching a baby hare nestled in handfuls of dead grass, she is in two minds about her actions: “I felt embarrassed and worried. I had no intention of taming the hare, only sheltering it, but it seemed that I had committed a bad error of judgement”.
It would have been easy to make a book like this about human agency and the writer’s journey of self-discovery. It is testament to Dalton that she does not make it so, by thinking beyond herself ... Holds within it the tension between the wild and domestic, the human and non- human ... Powerful and important.
