“Looking for goshawks is like looking for grace: it comes, but not often, and you don’t get to say when or how,” writes Helen Macdonald in “ H Is for Hawk ,” a book I picked up by accident (all credit to cover artist Chris Wormell) and which proved to be the greatest tool I had when one of my own parents passed away. When someone around you loses a loved one, it’s all but impossible to know what to say. I recommend reading “H Is for Hawk.”

For Macdonald, that most eloquent of memoirs emerged from the death of her father, photographer Alisdair MacDonald. But what Helen really did to process her grief was to adopt a goshawk. The book is partly about what a wild and uncommon thing that is to do, but it’s mostly about what was going on in Macdonald’s mind through the process (which involves

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