The Hawkman is a lyrical magical realism story that blends historical fiction with fairytale retelling. As such, I thought it worked well. The prose is beautiful, and we get an interesting use of imagery and theme, particularly in relation to sound. I enjoyed the juxtaposition of the past and present, and I liked reading of the growing relationship between the two protagonists. However, when I reached the end, I felt there had been something missing. I loved moments in the story, but it didn't quite form a cohesive whole. That said, it was still a delightful read and a creative retelling, and is well worth checking out if you enjoy adapted fairytales and magical realism.

From the first page the book draws you in with its enticing writing and description. The prologue alone invites you straight in to the story of mystery and intrigue. The book then follows a man who seemingly is more scavenger bird than human and it having an unexpected romance alongside it, usually pertains as a typical story, but as this unfurls you see it as a strange and wonderful thing.

The residents of post-WWI Bridgetonne, England, are unnerved by The Hawkman, the town’s most enigmatic indigent. This shabby, filthy recluse is harrassed by the local children and berated by the adults. He doesn’t speak, he bothers no one, and yet, the residents, especially Lord Thornton, want him out.

Miss Eva Williams, an American outsider, has taken a position at the local college under the employ of Lord Thornton. She is challenged by Thornton’s notion that the Hawkman should be gotten rid of in order to ensure the safety of the women of the college; however, her efforts are not what Lord Thornton intended. She shows compassion instead of contempt, and that causes quite an uproar in Bridgetonne.

This book is dreamy and mythical, bordering on magical realism. The backstories of both The Hawkman and Miss Williams are revealed gradually, interwoven with folklore and dark fairy tales to reinforce the motives of the characters.

I enjoyed this book because of its originality and departure from straightforward historical fiction. The atmosphere was believable and yet mysterious. At times the fairy tales arrived unexpectedly, leading to an abrupt change of narrative, and I didn’t understand the purpose or moral of most of them. Regardless, the writing was illusory and fantastical without sacrificing the sober reality of the effects of war.

Many thanks to Netgalley and Amberjack Publishing for an advance copy in exchange for my review.

A great war, a great love, and the mythology that unites them; The Hawkman: A Fairy Tale of the Great War is a lyrical adaptation of a beloved classic.

Set against the shattering events of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, at the tale’s heart are an American schoolteacher—dynamic and imaginative—and an Irish musician, homeless and hated—who have survived bloodshed, poverty, and sickness to be thrown together in an English village. Together they quietly hide from the world in a small cottage. 

Too soon, reality shatters their serenity, and they must face the parochial community. Unbeknownst to all, a legend is in the making—one that will speak of courage and resilience amidst the forces that brought the couple together even as outside forces threaten to tear them apart.- Goodreads

This book was inspired by the Grimm Brothers’fairy tale "The Bearskin" and although it wasn't a bad read, it was a hard read and mainly because almost nothing really happens and you almost think well what is the author trying to say. I questioned this while I was reading and when I was done with the book and even now as I write the review I wonder what the author was trying to get out. Yes, I can make an assumption but in this regards I don't feel as if it was exactly what the author wanted to portray. 

Here are my issues with this book, it was boring, I heard every voice in monotone, the love in this novel wasn't love but obligation and the magic part of the novel was hard to swallow and a little bit hard to understand. 

Even without prior knowledge of the Grimm Brothers’fairy tale "The Bearskin", you should be able to understand and see the fairy tale within any other novel but it just wasn't clicking with everything. 

I liked the alternative viewpoints presented in the novel and I really like the Hawkman's viewpoints as it told his past but there wasn't a true growth from him. You read this novel and there are some changes within his character and how he reacts to people but its like a child settling to crawl and doesn't try to walk. His link is the school teacher and if it wasn't due to circumstances that is all his link would have been.

But unfortunately, I did feel anything for any of the characters, the plot or even the setting. There wasn't enough emotions, details to the surroundings or enough story to connect the characters and have them build a decent relationship.

I was bored but I finished this book because there was a turning point and I wanted to know how it turned out. Was I disappointed? Yes, mostly in the time wasted because the ending ended exactly how I knew it would. Nothing was gained reading this book and I love me a fairy tale and magical realism but this book needed more time. 

2 Pickles

3.5 Stars. From an E-galley. Interesting book, a “fairy tale of the Great War.” Set in England after WW1 when many men suffered from PTSD, this is a love story that weaves the pasts of two damaged people in their attempts to simply survive. This novel has some lovely prose and great ideas, but it actually lacked a cohesive feel that made it all come together. Some of the character developments and plot points felt forced and unbelievable to me.

"A fairy tale of The Great War" is a tagline that draws you in. Hawkman is the story of a man who returns to WWI with PTSD and meets an equally damaged woman. There are some absolutely great moments and beautiful prose. However I found myself getting bogged down at points. The story seemed a bit forced and I couldn't connect with the characters.

'Yet it was his eye, or both of them, that attracted the most notice and gossip- their unnerving brilliance. It was hungry and restless; and it earned him his nickname.'

In this fairytale for grownups, an American schoolteacher (spinster, nay old maid) Miss Eva Williams, falls under the spell of the Hawkman, Mr. Michael Evan Sheehan. Sheehan is suffering from the torments of the war, including his time of imprisonment. His vagabond ways have damned him as an outcast, and his yellowing, ‘hungry and restless’ eyes make him more birdlike than human. Mrs. Sheehan knows there is more to the man, tormented by children’s taunts, rocks and even attempts at poisoning. He is more than a scavenger, certainly not a threat when he doesn’t fight back, though the children’s cruelty would deserve a firm punishment in a better world. She herself is a misfit in England, a foreigner, teaching at a lady’s college, horror of all horrors she is on the shelf and unmarrie, progressive (never a welcome trait in a woman bygone times). He becomes her cause.

Lord Thornton wants nothing more than his world to return to the normality of before the war. The Hawkman is a reminder, a constant stench of war and all its horrors. To make his village safe and ‘clean’ for it’s young ladies seems to be his sole purpose, ridding it of such scavengers as Sheehan. The villagers, especially his son Christopher( recovering after his own war wounds) are in compliance to Lord Thornton’s plans, but not Miss Williams. Even Thornton’s wife, Lady Margaret wants nothing more than to be ‘ride’ of the Hawkman. Miss Williams has a far better understanding of the ‘protagonist’ of various countries and sees in the Hawkman no difference. Sifting through the fears and myths, she sees past the ‘filth’ and reclusive behaviors for what they are the reactions of a broken, damaged man.

Eyes wide open, Eva invites Mr. Sheehan into her world with empathy and compassion. She goes gently with him, as one might a wounded animal. She sees the man, not the myth. Hiding him in the cottage won’t last, but she will not be cowed or bullied into giving up on him. When she comes to need him, one wonders just who needs salvation. With war weaved into the story, it is a unique twist on modern fairy tales and the true shame and horror is that people always find ways to invent monsters, to condemn those who need the most help to the shadows.

A quiet, yet moving tale.

Publication Date: June 5, 2018

Amberjack Publishing

I was initially drawn to request a copy of The Hawkman by both its intriguing tagline - "A Fairytale of the Great War" and its beautifully intricate cover art.
 
The Hawkman by Jane Rosenberg LaForge is set not long after World War One,  the main characters include an Irish Musician/Prisoner of War and an American Writer; personally, I wasn't initially convinced that combination would work as a fairytale but about 40 pages in it had me hooked. The plot is fairly simple and overall it's not the happy ever after fairytale I think people are more accustomed to nowadays; the characters backstories, particularly some of the flashbacks are sharp and brutal but I this adds to the understanding and appreciation the reader builds for each character and their actions in the present day and I loved how this developed throughout the book.
 
Despite it not being the happiest of tales I was left with the same feeling of contentment with the characters were left I would expect from a fairytale.  Eva Williams is an writes poetry and short stories, she moves to England to teach at a college owned by Lord Thornton in the village of Bridgetonne, which is also home to a man named by the local children as The Hawkman.  It's not long before Eva encounters the Hawkman for herself and with a lot of kindness and patience, she begins to earn his trust.

"The Hawkman" is not a fast-paced suspenseful novel, but is still a page-turner with its exploration of small town politics and the human aftermath of war and culture.

This book is really an adult fairy tale. The straight narrative of Sheehan as a sensitive POW and his emotional drama along with the caring of Miss Williams was quite interesting and emotional. However, the forays into the lyrical story telling and fairy tale aspects of the novel left me a bit bemused. Perhaps I am too “left-brained” to appreciate this part of the writing, the symbolism of which eluded me. I generally enjoyed the book and had a real feeling of the German POW camp during WWI and the British/Irish tension involved in Sheehan’s trauma.

This historical fiction novel taking place after World War I in England conveys its story through metaphor and magical realism that fit into its general framework as a retelling of the Grimm Brother’s story “The Bearskin.” The plot of the Grimm story concerns a young man who “enlisted as a soldier, conducted himself bravely, and was always at the very front when it was raining bullets. As long as the war lasted all went well, but when peace was made he was dismissed…”. It was then the ex-soldier became an outcast, and wandered the world becoming more and more indistinguishable from an animal, until his good-heartedness and magic restored him.

LaForge enlarges the story of “Bearskin” by loosely integrating experiences recounted in an actual memoir by Lance Cpl. F. W. Harvey of the 2/5th Battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment. The result follows the life of fictional Michael Sheehan, before, during, and after the Great War.

During the war, Sheehan, like Harvey, survived the nightmarish trenches only to be put in one horrific prisoner camp after another. His soul-crushing experiences left Sheehan mostly deaf and mute, in addition to the psychological damage. He now lives as a feared and reviled vagabond in the town of Bridgetonne in England. He has done nothing to generate the hostile reaction to him except for the fact of his homelessness and his (very) unkempt appearance. The townspeople call him The Hawkman.

The Fifth Earl of Bridgetonneshire, Arthur Thorton, maintained a boarding school in Bridgetonne and was the de facto head of the town. He saw nothing between himself and his goal of returning to “normality” after the war but the offensive presence of The Hawkman. As Thorton saw it, the Hawkman represented all of the - to his mind - moocher refugees of the war, who took advantage of the privileged, with their “voluntary poverty,” their communicable diseases, and their “clamorous appetites.” As the author writes: “Tacitly supporting any beneficent enterprise to feed, clothe, and comfort a virtual Bedouin of the British countryside did not align with either Lord Thorton’s inclinations or prejudices.”

But one of the teachers at Thorton’s school has other ideas. Eva Williams, 25, had come to the school with some renown as an author of small fairy stories and little poems. In fact, upon learning about The Hawkman, she told the Thortons the story of The Bearskin, but Lord Thorton and his son Christopher resisted the analogy: “He is a scavenger. Until one day, he will have scavenged all that he can. Then, he will turn predatory.”

Soon thereafter, Eva encountered The Hawkman herself, and invited him back to her cottage for a meal and a bath. She saw that he was obviously shell-shocked in the war. “Whatever it had been, it left him less than human. … he could not withstand the slightest disturbance.”

Through flashbacks we learn about Sheehan’s war experience. He had been in three different camps:. “The Germans had changed him from a soldier to a prisoner, from a man to a creature, and now they had executed a branding, in case he ever had the means to change back into a man again.” That is, the Irish rejected him for joining the Brits. The Brits rejected him for being Irish and for having been imprisoned. And further, he is now too disabled to return to the work he did previously.

Before the war he had been a pianist and also taught piano. But because he cannot hear, and his hands were mangled by the war, this option is not open to him. Sheehan is now basically a dead man walking. But Miss Williams doesn’t give up on him, asserting to the protesting Thorton that “each of us has only our humanity to recommend us….”

Eva is not without her own appalling backstory. The circumstances of her childhood helped create the empathy that she now extended to Sheehan.

She continued to take care of him, and when his fear subsided, he began to help with tasks. Then Eva fell ill, and Sheehan carried her to the college infirmary, staying by her side constantly.

In this way, Christopher, visiting Eva often, got to know Sheehan, musing: “He was a man of discards sewn together, and Christopher wondered how it was that the village, his father, and even himself had managed to stretch such a small, improbable reliquary of self-doubt into a vast, frightening figure of half-man and half-monster.”

Christopher had wanted to be a hero but failed both in the war and in peacetime. He saw that The Hawkman was a hero, the kind of man he wished he were. He began to help him. He also had an epiphany about his father: “The man could not contain himself, whether it was his malice or his ebullience, when exercising his cruelty.”

What happens next was in part foreshadowed by the preface, but still offers surprises.

Discussion: This book is difficult to read in part because the magical realism makes what happened a bit opaque to readers. On the other hand, that can help the reader get through the very awful scenes of torture and mistreatment.

Evaluation: This is an interesting, thought-provoking story, with lots of elements that could be discussed in a book club.

A unique fairy tale revolving around a woman who writes stories and a pianist turned soldier suffering afyer 4 years as a POW. The story is beautiful as we move from the present day struggles of the two and their individual histories. The style reminder me a bit of The Bear and the Nightingale.

From a world of inhumanity the Hawkman is shown humanity by Miss Williams. She alone seems to reocognise his suffering and strives to help him even though her health is declining. Lord Thornton epitomises the entitled and uncaring face of the commanding class in the pursuit of war, and he obviously finds the presence of this damaged vagrant in His village a threat . Perhaps Miss Williams was drawn to Mr Sheehan because of her damaged upbringing, her stories were her way of making sense of the world. She is
Sheehan's champion and eventually Christopher Thornton comes to understand the responsibilties of his class and society to these broken returning men. Beautifully written , one of those books where a second reading would reveal further insight, and though the subject matter , WW1 has been covered many times, the account of the Hawkman's experience is no less harrowing. The book cover would make me want to pick it off the shelf for further investigation.

Mrs. Eva Williams is a teacher at a lady's college in England when she meets The Hawkman, a seemingly broken man whom the villagers do not want around. She takes him under her wing to help him. The Hawkman turns out to be more complex than just a beggar on the street.

The Hawkman by Joane Rosenberg LaForge has a different perspective that I enjoyed. The Hawkman character is not your typical man, and LaForge does a great job presenting him in a different way. Her characters build nicely throughout the book and I was pleasantly surprised with some of the supporting characters changes.

Golden eyes dulled into silence.

Hounded and ridiculed, he swept up the trailing ends of his long tattered coat attempting to flee from the taunting fever that surrounded him. Scavenging in alleys behind butcher shops. Bruised and battered hands extended in prayerful begging motions. Bird-like scratchings of the earth.

Until she appeared.........

The aftermath of the Great War leaves a pallid and sallow hue blanketing those who have been touched by its worldwide sepsis. The town of Bridgetonne, led by Lord Thorton, attempts to shore up some semblance of normalcy. The women's college prides itself in educating young ladies to enter into a world shattered by war and its uncertainties.

Eva Williams, an American, lives in a small cottage on the edge of Lord Thorton's estate which houses the college. She is the author of several books of fairy tales and poetry and teaches courses in those areas at the college. Hers is a simple life now after leaving behind a most painful life in the states.

What draws us into the inner circles of strangers is a tiny beacon of light that illuminates and recognizes one's pain aligned to another's. Eva is touched by what she experiences in the presence of The Hawkman. She extends her hand and he hesitates before holding it tightly in his. Eva brings him home to the cottage and it is here that simple humanity is revealed.

Jane Rosenberg LaForge creates a vivid spectrum of colors into the inner mechanisms of what drives and motivates the human spirit. This story line is laced with sharp "tellings" of the composites of one's dangling chain of life experiences. She intersperses this story with fables and fairy tales that come to life and draw you in. There is an instant flicker of familiarity as we associate past events happening here to those still lingering in the modern world. You can almost hear your own gasp in its truism.

Although The Hawkman is a work of brilliance, it may not affect everyone in the same light. I was fully and willingly caught up in the backstories of these two main characters. The multi-layering of experiences may prove too maze-like for some readers. But I would say that we are far from simple creatures sharing a combined human nature. The last 50 pages are wrapped in wonder. Simple wonder.

I received a copy of The Hawkman through NetGalley for an honest review. My thanks to Amberjack Publishing and to Jane Rosenberg LaForge for the opportunity.