Jack Duggan’s Reviews > Raising Hare: A Memoir > Status Update

More really stunning descriptions of Hare behaviour, muddied by yet another reminder that this author is clearly hugely wealthy and that is not really a tale of adversity

While thinking about why I’m not enjoying this much, I thought about it I’d enjoy it more as a film and realised what the problem is: good storytelling thrives on “show, don’t tell”, but because of the format telling is all this can do. A film, or a traditional novel, could portray things with nuance through imagery, but by forcing it into concretised words it feels clumsy and without depth

Another chapter full of descriptions of treating the hare like a pet instead of a wild animal, wild lecturing on how important nature is 🙃

The descriptions of the leveret’s behaviour in this chapter were so immersive and enchanting, which has been a welcome change of pace.

The description of bringing it inside to keep it out of the rain really make it clear it didn’t seem like there was much serious intention of rewilding it.

Chloe Dalton; “I will not habituate the Leveret to humans”

Also Chloe Dalton: *repeated descriptions of habituating the Leveret to humans*

(The bit on Superfetation was pretty cool though)

So far this seems to be the story of a woman doggedly refusing to accept accountability for having basically doomed a young hare, framed as “fighting to keep it alive”, and then obstinately refusing to use her clearly considerable wealth to entrust care to literally anyone remotely qualified to do it instead of her. Poor decision-making fuelled entirely by pride, even if this was during the heights of Covid

Not off to a good start, the author clearly wants to make a career she’s incredibly proud of herself for sound like a drawback and is trying to frame the whole thing so dramatically it comes across as really artificial