Hello and welcome to the Slate Audio Book Club.

Our book for May is the beguiling H is for Hawk by Helen McDonald.

I'm Katie Waldman, Slate's Words Correspondent, and I'm joined today from New York by our fearless leader, editor Julia Turner.

Hi, Katie.

I'm so excited to be on the show.

Does everyone call you Fearless Leader when you do podcasts?

No.

Steve just likes to deride and denigrate me, so I'm very pleased to settle into this welcoming bid.

Okay, excellent.

And then joining us from Boston.

We're very excited to have.

Cambridge.

Oh, Cambridge. That is the voice of Megan O'Rourke in Cambridge, who is a slate culture critic and a memoirist and poet and writer and our third participant in today's discussion.

Hi, Megan. Hi, guys. H's for Hawk is not easy to classify. It dips in and out of a lot of different genres, from nature writing to memoir, to literary criticism, to history, to biography, to, I would argue, prose poetry.

But at heart, it is about a woman, an academic who is grief-stricken after the death of her father,

a photographer, and adopts a goshawk for mysterious

reasons that hopefully we'll discuss. Along the way, she traces the history of T.H. White, who wrote

the once in future king and the sword in the stone, and who also tried and failed to train a

gosshawk. Anyway, I would love to just jump right in because I can't wait to hear what you guys made at this book.

Megan, what was your general reaction as someone who has written extensively about grief?

Well, it's going to be hard for me to give just a quick general reaction because I have a lot of different thoughts about this book, which is a really interesting and very compelling book in many ways.

I don't love the word compelling, but as you say,

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