George

January 1, 2023

The daughter of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, painter/poet Hughes lives in the Welsh countryside with a passel of animals, some rescued. Her rescues have included a baby magpie she saved from a nest destroyed in a storm, whom she named George. Here she recounts George's transformation from a terrified bundle of damp feathers to a charming and affectionate companion, transforming her own life even as she sorrowfully contemplates the time when he'll have to fly away.

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April 1, 2023
A painter and poet's account of how caring for a wild baby magpie changed her life. Lifelong bird and animal lover Hughes never foresaw that the magpie chick she found one spring day in her garden would become the center of her world. The lone survivor of three abandoned baby magpies, George, as the author named the "tiny feathered scrap," joined her indoors to live with her three dogs and her less-than-enthusiastic husband. From childhood on, Hughes had cared for a colorful assortment of animals, including badgers, tadpoles, and cats. But George, with his never-ending need to eat, shriek, and poop, proved to be her greatest pet-parenting challenge. Enchanted with his feisty ways and the helplessness that made George totally dependent on her, Hughes soon fell in love with the "eating-shitting machine" that perched on her shoulder and acted like a fourth dog. Everything that had preoccupied her to that point--e.g., fixing up her ramshackle old house into the home she never had growing up with her peripatetic father--became secondary. As George grew into his ability to fly over the summer, the author, fearing her magpie-hating neighbors would harm him, began building an aviary to protect him. Its completion that fall coincided with George's final disappearance from her life. The "bird-shaped hole" that appeared in her heart afterward led Hughes to begin fostering other birds, like the dying crow she named Oscar and raptors like the broken-winged Bengal eagle owl she named Arthur ("I was still focused on crows and magpies, but it ate meat, it was stunningly beautiful, and it NEEDED A HOME"). Illustrated throughout with pen-and-ink drawings, this charming memoir about the author's accidental adventures in avian rescue offers tantalizing insights into her struggle to fly free of the difficult emotional legacy bequeathed by her literary-icon parents, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. A poignantly heartwarming delight.

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Starred review from May 1, 2023
Painter and poet Hughes spent her peripatetic childhood moving from place to place with her father, poet Ted Hughes, after her mother, poet Sylvia Plath, died by suicide. All Frieda wanted was a forever home. When she found the house she could grow into, she began to fill it with pets and the grounds with gardens as she finally set down roots. And then came an interruption. A windstorm brought down a magpie nest with one survivor. She named this screeching, feathered scrap George. In this lovely chronicle of setting aside life's usual demands to meet the immediate needs of an orphaned magpie chick, Hughes records her fascination with George as he grows and joins (and nearly takes over) her family. In lyrical prose full of introspection and humor, Hughes describes George being washed by her dogs, his learning to fly, and his curiosity about everything. Caring for George eventually sent the author in new directions, culminating with her adoption of two owls. This is a perfect match for Featherhood (2021), by Charlie Gilmour, the son of a poet who also rescued a magpie. Enlivened with Hughes' drawings, this portrait of a bird mirrors how each of us maneuvers through our own existence.

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