Readers who likes eccentric characters and strange twists of fate will love Harry's Trees.
Oriana and Amanda live near the woods in the Endless Mountains area of Pennsylvania. Life is ordinary until Amanda's perfect husband and Oriana's perfect father dies.
Dean dies sprawled out like a snow angel in a snowy field. His buddy, Ronnie, is convinced there are feather impressions in the snow. He believes Dean has become some sort of winged creature--a red-tailed hawk--who can interact with the townspeople after his death.
But its more than feathers that take on a larger significance. The lottery ticket Harry bought is piece of bad magic, an unlucky talisman.
Amanda Jeffers, Oriana's mother, doesn't believe in miracles, fairy tales, or magic but nonetheless she shelters Harry. She lets him rent out her tree house because they are in the same club--both having survived a year after a spouse's death.
Amanda thinks Harry is safe--that he is a "bland, levelheaded bureaucrat who understood rules." Little does she know that Harry is the opposite of what she thinks.
Harry is just like the "grum" in the story Oriana loves from Olive Perkins' library. He is the catalyst that will change everyone perspective; this is, if his brother, Wolf, doesn't catch up with him first.
Wolf is appropriately named because he is greedy and destructive--the villain of Harry's childhood. His greed is the opposite of Harry's altruism.
Wolf is drawn to the only other character who is extremely voracious--Stu Gipner. Will Wolf and Stu bring destruction to the fairy tale world Harry and Oriana have constructed? Will Amanda, who is jaded and practical, believe in the fairy tale?
Though she is an expert who has trained many raptors, MacDonald feels compelled to train a goshawk after her father's death. Known to be the most difficult of all to train, the goshawk is a suitable challenge that allows her to grieve and escape from the world.
MacDonald's father, a photojournalist, viewed the world through his camera lens. He taught Helen to be a watcher and that is what she does while training hawks.
For the first few weeks she "watches" them; she allows herself to become invisible while feeding them from gloved hands.
The next stage is "manning" the hawk. Manning the hawk means uncovering its head in public. Up to this point, the hawk wear a hood in public.
In this wildly original work of non-fiction, MacDonald also confronts her younger self and her disdain for fellow hawk-trainer and legendary author, T.H. White.
His loneliness mirrors her own though she does not appear to recognize this. As an adult, MacDonald comprehends White's troubled soul and his loneliness.
MacDonald is an academic so much of the writing comes across an a beautifully-written academic essay. She is also a poet which explains the work's formidable imagery: "The hawk was a fire that burned my hurts away."
Since she is also historian, MacDonald often engages in interesting asides, like her discussion of the Pastoral movement that occurred in Britain in the 1930s.
Mostly, though, she shares her triumphs and failures as an austringer. Though she trains Mabel to land on her fist, inexplicably, her goshawk stops doing it consistently. MacDonald feels she has failed her hawk.
Much of this non-fiction treatise reads like feral therapy. MacDonald is afraid to let Mabel loose of the creance as she is supposed to do: "I'm convinced that Mabel will rocket away from me and disappear for ever."
This isn't a bond she takes lightly. During her time of grief, she has frequent angry outbursts. She finds it particularly hard to learn to trust again:
"Flying a hawk free is always scary. It is where you test these lines. And it's not a thing that's easy to do when you've lost trust in the world, and your heart is turned to dust."
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Brooke Davis is a vibrant new voice in fiction. She gives the viewpoints of three characters--a lonely old man, a crochety old woman and a seven-year-old girl who contemplates death. Her father has just died and her mother has abandoned her in a department store.
Davis mixes just the right amount of pathos and humor when she gives voices Milly. When her mother does not return for her, she imagines that one of the manikins is her friend. She record dead things in her dead things journal. She leaves notes that will supposedly help her Mum find her: "In here Mum."
She also befriends Karl, a touch typist who writes messages to his deceased wife in the air. By accident, Karl joins Milly and Agatha on a bus journey to Kalgoorlie.
The bus trip is followed by an outlandish train trip through Nullarbor Plain. The three of them are determined to find Milly's Mum or, at least, a relative to take care of her.
Lost and Found is completely different from anything else I've read. Very few novels, after all, feature a seven-year-old who run away with two octogenarians. Very few novels features a seven-year-old who is obsessed with death.
What makes Milly so unique, however, is her ironic innocence and intelligence.She nearly meets her match though on the train when she meets another little boy who calls himself "Captain Everything."
Readers who likes eccentric characters and strange twists of fate will love Harry's Trees. 
