Title: Raising Hare
Author: Chloe Dalton
Genre: Memoir, Nature
Pages: 304
Publication Date: Mar 4, 2025
StoryGraph* Moods: Informative, Reflective, Inspiring
How I Stumbled Upon This Book: The woman that runs one of my book clubs (and owns my fav bookshop) recommended it.
Other Books by this author: They are currently working on their second book.
*StoryGraph also offers content warnings.
Description: During lockdown, Chloe Dalton was living in the English countryside of her childhood – a restored barn surrounded by farmland. This setting is a stark contrast to her pre-COVID life – where she lived and worked in the city and traveled for work – sometimes risking death to get the story. She seems to thrive in this high-paced world, and time in the country at first feels somewhat like a punishment.
Enter a leveret, or baby hare. Out in the open. In danger. At first, Dalton leaves the leveret in the hopes that its mother will come and take it back to safety. When this doesn’t happen, Dalton takes the leveret into her care hoping to keep it safe until it can be returned to nature. Unfortunately, she didn’t understand what she was doing when she brought the little leveret home. Once in human care, a hare’s survival rate plummets to 10%. (One could argue that if left out in the open, the leveret’s survival rate would have been 0%. Dalton knew the second fact – she didn’t know the first.)
Dalton creates a set of boundaries for herself and the leveret – she does not name it, tries not to touch it, and does not confine it (except once, briefly). She creates a specially constructed flap so the hare can come and go as it pleases.
This memoir chronicles their time together and the challenges they face – but also the improbable bond of trust between them. Sometimes, life gives us exactly what we need in the most unexpected of was.
Why I recommend this book: When my friend first described this book to me, I didn’t quite understand why they were talking about it with such regard. A memoir about a woman that takes in a baby hare? But I trust this friend (and bookshop owner) – when she says a book is good, it’s good.
So I put a hold on it from the library and waited (the waitlist was quite long). When it finally came in, I devoured it in two days. I couldn’t put it down. The book is indeed part memoir, where we get to see a change in Dalton as she adapts her home and life to coexist with this wild creature – she learns, she grows, she slows down. She is inextricably changed.
The book is also part non-fiction deep dive into leverets. I didn’t expect, even as someone who loves to learn about random topics, to enjoy these parts of the book as much as I did. They are fascinating creatures, hares. And through Dalton’s eyes, we get to see one up close as it grows up, adapts, and changes – and as she learns about hares, she teaches us.
I’ll be honest – I don’t know why this book works. Why I gobbled it up. On face value, it sounds like every other wild animal encounter book out there – but somehow its not. It’s beautifully written, educational, and perhaps satiates our own appetite for such a slowing down, for such an encounter.
“I tell myself not to count the years ahead in which she might never again come, but rather cherish the days she has given me of her own free will, when she lowered her species’ instinctive guard against humans, and shared the beauty and mystery of her presence in silent and graceful companionship. I will remember her leaving, but I will always know that before she did, she always, first, looked back.”
~ Chloe Dalton, Raising Hare
Ami Maxine 