Penelope: A Love Story - Hardcover

Bochner, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 13: 9798217399413

Publisher: Crown, 2026

Synopsis

The extraordinary true story of an injured, abandoned fawn and the man who nurses her back to health, transforming his understanding of love and erasing the barrier between humans and animals.

"This is a book drenched in tenderness and suffused with wonder. . . . Penelope is a revelation."—Sy Montgomery, New York Times bestselling author of The Soul of an Octopus

On a late winter evening, author Paul Bochner looked out the window of his home. A solitary fawn stood in near darkness, famished, disabled, and clearly in pain. Hobbled with a broken foot, abandoned by her mother and left to die, she had miraculously endured an exceptionally brutal winter alone in the woods.

Perhaps it was an imperative toward survival which led Penelope to his door. From that night, remaining wild and free, she returned to him daily. Each time she appeared, Bochner greeted her gently, offering food, empathy, and care, allowing her to guide the progress of their relationship. As he earned Penelope’s trust and observed the full range of her emotions, it became evident that their inner lives were more alike than might have seemed possible.

In words and photographs, Paul Bochner shares an uncommon connection of the heart, mind and spirit with a wild animal, and with it his growing respect for her and for all creatures.

Woven with the joy and pain of living, Penelope is the most unlikely of love stories, and one of the most memorable.

About this title

About the Author

Paul Bochner began his professional life early, as a working musician through his mid-teens in Los Angeles, then, at age 17, moving to Montreal at the invitation of the National Film Board of Canada. He has won several international awards for his films and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in painting. He has written for The New Yorker and The Atlantic. Outside the door of his home in New York’s Hudson Valley, which he shares with his wife, Connie, is a stone with the carved words; “Our home is a safe haven that nurtures all living creatures, an eternal resting place away from harm.”

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The World of Each Other

Emerging gently from forests in the half-light of dawn, vanishing silently, appearing again at dusk, deer seem to reside in a parallel plane. Nearly illusory in their graceful presence, so masterfully camouflaged that they can be invisible when they are in front of us, their passage on the earth is brief. They rarely interact with humans.

Yet one remarkable fawn arose from the dream world. The first time we saw each other, in early June, 2014, she was a day or two old, poised in sunlight under tall pines in an area I regard as the deer sanctuary, half an acre of wooded land in front of my home. I leave it untouched for them, effectively a continuation of the many protected acres of trees, stream, and pond on the other side of the road, their natural habitat, and each spring the deer give birth here.

On that morning, I stood a few yards from the fawn, certain that her mother was nearby and protectively watching. I admired the fresh sienna coat with its scattering of white spots, her dark eyes and slender, long legs, and I took her photograph, which I sent to a friend with the words “perfect new life.” The new life may have been perfect in the moment, but it would not remain so. When I saw her a few weeks later, the fawn’s left forelimb was broken, her foot turned under, facing backward rather than forward, her weight borne by her wrist. With each halting and tender step, her injured leg collapsed. More significantly, her mother had abandoned her and she was solitary.

The disabled fawn then vanished. I thought of her from time to time, assuming she had perished. I could not have guessed that she would eventually reappear. I could never have imagined how she would alter the ways in which I see the world. Over the next several years a sequence of events would lead us across boundaries widely thought to be unbridgeable.

It might seem improbable that, living only nineteen miles from New York City, I could develop and sustain a relationship with a wild deer, yet such a connection would be improbable anywhere, given a deer’s innate wariness. Having lived in their presence for decades, I had paid as much attention to deer as I paid to squirrels, which is to say not much. Yet I had observed them enough to learn that a whitetail fawn enjoys a strong bond with its mother, continuing to nurse for several months, well past the time it begins eating vegetation, staying close to its family for protection and guidance. A female may remain with its mother for life, a male for at least its first year, and what we term a herd is generally a matriarchal family of several generations. They forage together, sleep in a cluster, play games at dusk, running, leaping, chasing one another, and the young are well protected. A disabled fawn, isolated, unable to run or even to properly walk, is likely to be targeted by a coyote, a fox, or a large raptor, swift death all but certain.

In that June week, three fawns had been born to two mothers, or so it had appeared to me. Following the disappearance of the disabled fawn, the remaining twins and their mother stayed in the deer sanctuary throughout the summer and fall. The abandoning doe, seeming to have driven away her unwanted offspring, was herself gone. The twins and their mother settled into the sanctuary, sleeping under the pines, eating plentiful greenery, wandering only short distances. This stretch of land, safely above the road, provides shelter, and with its range of vegetation to eat and nest in, with fresh water nearby, they had all they needed.

As autumn gave way to the extremely hard winter of 2015, with record-cold temperatures, strong winds, ice, and massive snowfall, the deer grew their characteristic grey-brown, thick, and shaggy winter coats, resembling donkey fur, in contrast to their sleek summer coats. In winter, under normal circumstances, deer subsist on the twigs, dead leaves, evergreen needles, and small branches left exposed. With deep snow on the ground, there seemed almost nothing available, and I began tossing pieces of apple and bread for them. On nights when the temperature, with windchill, would fall to twenty degrees below zero Fahrenheit, the three would be at the door at ten thirty, often back again at four in the morning, back at eight and so through the day.

After their late evening feeding, they would go around to their sanctuary in front of the house and settle into nests in the snow, depressions of customized sizes, carved out with their front hooves. Lying close to each other, their body heat melting the snow, they sank within it to a floor of leaves. Moving and living as a unit, rarely more than a few feet from one another, the twins had the advantage of being together under their mother’s care and protection, and of receiving supplemental nutrition from me. Because of the harsh conditions, I found myself paying attention to the deer for the first time, becoming invested in their well-being.

I had assumed the abandoned fawn had died, but I was wrong. I occasionally caught fleeting glimpses of her, at a distance, always alone, sometimes barely able to move, and I could not imagine how she was surviving. Almost certainly keeping to herself in the woods across the road, where she may have found a sheltered nesting spot beside the stream, eating what was within reach, spending her days and nights lying still, she may have been waiting in vain for her mother to return to her, to take her back, waiting for healing which would never come. I had begun to think of her as The Girl with the Broken Foot.

It is hard to witness any life in pain, harder to contemplate a young creature left to die, particularly so when the new life is a graceful mammal with large eyes and soft coloration, attributes which inspire our adoration and nurturance. It is challenging to construct the intention of an abandoning mother. Freeing herself and her healthy fawns of the burden of a disabled family member, which would slow them in their foraging, and perhaps attract predators, obeying an evolutionary imperative to nurture only the healthiest offspring, a mother might anticipate that a rejected fawn, deprived of a mother’s nursing, guidance, and protection, would quickly perish.

Edition details

• Publisher: Crown
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798217399413
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240