by Chloe Dalton
Pantheon, 2025. 304 pages. Memoir
In February 2021, political advisor and speechwriter Chloe Dalton, spending COVID lockdown in the English countryside, stumbles upon a newborn hare—a leveret—that had been chased by a dog. Fearing for its life, she eventually brings it home, only to discover how impossible it is to rear a wild hare, most of whom perish in captivity from either shock or starvation. Through trial and error, she learns to feed and care for the leveret with every intention of returning it to the wilderness. Raising Hare chronicles their journey together, while also taking a deep dive into the lives and nature of hares, and the way they have been viewed historically in art, literature, and folklore. We witness first-hand the joy at this extraordinary relationship between human and animal, which serves as a reminder that the best things, and the most beautiful experiences, arise when we least expect them.
Raising Hare was a beautiful, hopeful, and thought-provoking read for me. Perhaps thanks to her background in high-stakes international relations, Dalton strikes a perfect balance of capturing both the personality of the hare and her own emotions throughout the experience without ever veering into sentimentality. I especially appreciated how hard she worked to care for the hare as a wild animal rather than a pet, even as she came to love the small creature. I’d recommend this book for animal lovers, nature-enthusiasts, and memoir-readers alike.
If you like Raising Hare: A Memoir, you might also like:
by Helen Macdonald
Grove Press, 2015. 300 pages. Nonfiction
An award-winning best-seller from the UK recounts how the author, an experienced falconer grieving the sudden death of her father, endeavored to train for the first time a dangerous goshawk predator as part of her personal recovery.
by Frans de Waal
W.W. Norton & Company, 2019. 326 pages. Nonfiction
A whirlwind tour of new ideas and findings about animal emotions, based on De Waal's renowned studies of the social and emotional lives of chimpanzees, bonobos, and other primates. De Waal discusses facial expressions, animal sentience and consciousness, Mama's life and death, the emotional side of human politics, and the illusion of free will. He distinguishes between emotions and feelings, all the while emphasizing the continuity between our species and other species. And he makes the radical proposal that emotions are like organs: we don't have a single organ that other animals don't have, and the same is true for our emotions.
SGR
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