A Review from the Heart: Falling in love with Chloe Dalton's Memoir, "Raising Hare"

The soul medicine we all need right now

A deeply heartfelt book review today - what I’m calling medicine for the soul and exactly what we all need right now: a kind, gentle, wise, warm, beautifully written memoir, RAISING HARE.

Chloe Dalton’s regular life is that of a fast paced foreign office political advisor in London. It’s a life she’s signed up for and loves. Until the pandemic sets in and she moves to her small farmhouse in the countryside where she saves a tiny leveret and her life is turned upside down. In a beautiful phrase the end of the book: “I did not tame the hare, she stilled me,” Dalton encapsulates how she is changed by this encounter and this cohabitation with a wild animal.

I was most moved by how Dalton so rigorously worked to adapt her behaviours and her world to preserve the wildness of the hare, to not disturb her or, when the time came, the hare’s own pregnancy and motherhood. It felt like such a powerful antidote to how humans have come to relate to nature: we dominate and destroy, we wreck habitats, we make the natural world bend to our needs. Here, Dalton decides to take the opposite approach: to do all she can not to interfere with the life and wildness of the hare, even if it comes at a cost to her own comfort and way of life.

And of course, when we begin to do that, to live in reciprocity with nature, extraordinary things happen. We open ourselves to being transformed, touched, embraced by a world that has been waiting for us all along. The way this magical, tender, winsome hare embraces Dalton in ways that we are told are impossible, when it comes to wild animals, reminds us that we are animals too and that when we begin to rekindle our animal natures, a relationship is made possible that can bring us back to life and to ourselves.

I prescribe this book to as the best kind of medicine - and delicious medicine at that. Run to your local indie and buy a few copies: for yourself and for your friends and family. You will be changed by it, for good and for the better.

With love & happy reading,

Virginia🤍

Virginia Macgregor is the author of five novels for adults and two for young adults. She has an MFA in Creative Writing with a specialism in the teaching of writing. She lives with her husband, her three children, her four cats and a home full of books and coffee mugs, in New Hampshire. She can often be found writing at her In Real Life bookstore café in her local town.