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I don't mean to be condescending or anything when I call Hawkmistress! (or anything else in the area) "escapist". I mean it in the good sense, in that it take the reader's attention outside and away from the mundane ordinary things of this particular world, out to strange and fascinating things in a different world. But in that different world there are still, there are still in abundance, the things that make this world so interesting, like love and fear and parents and children and freedom and bondage and tradition and newness and all.
This novel is part of Bradley's enormous and rich set of loosely connected novels about Darkover, a planet accidentally settled by some crashlanding humans from Earth, who develop (various psionic abilities, and) an interesting culture of their own (more or less forgetting their Earthian origins) and who are rediscovered by the mainstream Terran culture some thousands of years later.
Although Bradley says in the introduction to another Darkover book that she considers the heart of the series to be about the interplay of Darkoverites and Terrans after rediscovery and that she started writing pre-rediscovery novels only when her fans insisted, I (like some of those fans, maybe) am particularly fond of the pre-rediscovery novels. Darkover with its traditions and culture and its lack of metals and spaceships is, maybe, an easier place to escape into.
So anyway, this particular book is about a young woman who can communicate with animals telepathically, and who has to run away from home in order to be free to do it. In the process of finding herself, she experiences various interesting aspects of Darkover society, takes part in a war, grows up, and stuff like that. Like most of the Darkover books, it can be read all by itself (which is how I've always read them over the years), or as part of an extended saga whose chronology you can find talked about all over the web. Either way, a pretty fast and enjoyable read, especially if you'd like to spend a few days as a young woman flying her hawk on a distant planet circling a big red sun.
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