When Women Were Dragons: an enduring, feminist novel from New York Times bestselling author, Kelly Barnhill

Product Information

Ok, so I will admit the title of this book really called to me when I saw it. When Women Were Dragons is a reimagining with a definite fantasy thread, the dragons kind of give it away really! I am NOT usually a reader of anything 1950s... or anything mid-1900s. The sexism, it gets to me. But a novel that reimagines that time period specifically with the agency of women found via a "Dragoning?" (Yes, it's what you're thinking. Women turned into DRAGONS!) As the narrator is young and confused, for at least 3/4 of the book, we unfortunately don't get to experience dragoning in a way that is satisfying. Every potentially powerful moment is shown to us so passively that this book loses any hope of igniting the spark this concept promised. Keep your eyes on the ground. You don’t want any dangerous ideas. Perhaps this is how we learn silence - an absence of words, an absence of context, a hole in the universe where the truth should be. This is Alex’s memoir (of sorts). Alex saw her first dragon when she was four. She was still a child when the Mass Dragoning happened. Through her eyes, we not only see how the Mass Dragoning changed society as a whole but also how it impacted upon Alex’s own family.

The feminism went a little too hard here. The discrimination is almost a little too extreme and maybe that's the point but it just seemed a bit too much for me. This is a world where ALL women are beat down and treated as no more than homemakers and child-bearers. There are essentially no males in this story to redeem the species. There is one male who is not a villain and he's too focused on the science of dragons to actually bother about standing up for women.This ARC is prefaced with a letter to Barnhill's readers explicating her reasons for writing the book and what she wishes readers to see and to feel. The reader is then bombarded with three inscriptions, a frontispiece, and not one but two imaginary textual artefacts (where their attribution is almost longer than the excerpt itself) before the novel proper. Chapters are then punctuated by further fabricated textual 'sources', the tone and style of which are indistinguishable from the authorial voice used in the narrative, and suffer from a similarly overbearing condescension. Then Aunt Marla disappears during a “mass dragooning” of nearly 650,000 women, leaving a baby behind. Beatrice is adopted as Alex’s “sister,” and any mention of her aunt or dragons is forbidden. The main story follows Alex (not Alexandra, to be clear), a young girl who one day sees an old lady become a dragon. No one talks about, no one is allowed to report on it, but there is a phenomena where women transform into dragons, in particular the Mass Dragoning of 1955 where 300,000 women transformed, flying away and even punishing the men who hurt them in the process. But this isn’t a one time thing, it keeps happening but it’s just not talked about, the people left behind without lovers, mothers, sisters and so on, the girls feeling the urge to fly away, the girls feeling chained down … and throughout Alex’s journey, and her role as a daughter, a sister, a student and a partner, you follow her find her freedom her own way.

The book is written in the style of a historical memoir; our MC Alex recalls her life from childhood, interspersed with newspaper articles, court case records, scientific journals, etc. Unfortunately, there was no differentiation in writing style to separate the personal memoir and the historical pieces. When Women Were Dragons is an attention-grabbing title. It sounds like alternative history, is it? Yes. But is it also a metaphor? Yes. Or is it an allegory? Again, yes. It’s also in part a coming-of-age story. You see, it all depends how you look at it. Jane’s story too is deeply troubling. At 16, she was groomed by the older director of her ballet troupe, Alain, who taught her to seduce — to abuse — boys as young as 13 so he could watch them having sex. When it came to trial it was harder to prosecute Alain than Jane; after all, he hadn’t touched the victims. Jane is branded a criminal and left destroyed: “I will never be whole, I can never feel good.” Our best selves and our worst selves and our myriad iterations of mediocre selves are all extant simultaneously within a soul containing multitudes.”The Newbery Medal-winning children’s author dedicates her first novel for adult readers to Christine Blasey Ford, whose testimony at the confirmation hearings of Justice Brett Kavanaugh unleashed the rage of many women. In Sandra Newman’s “The Men,” all cisgender men and transgender women suddenly vanish. When the protagonist Jane’s husband and son disappear from their camping vacation, she seeks out Evangelyne — her charismatic ex who now heads the country’s Commensalist Party (ComPA). “Evangelyne who I believed in above all people,” Jane thinks, “could find my son if anyone could.” Jane, a former dancer with a criminal record, is not alone in her quest — the story also follows other women longing for their men: a father, a best friend, a brother, two sons. The novel is set in the U.S. and imagines an alternative history where aggrieved and persecuted women are able to transform into dragons, culminating in the 1955 mass dragoning event in which many wives and mothers were transformed. A GOODREADS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A fiery feminist fantasy tale set in 1950s America where thousands of women have spontaneously transformed into dragons, exploding notions of a woman’s place in the world and expanding minds about accepting others for who they really are. Gosh, where will I even start? This beautiful and powerful book pushed me in a rabbit hole researching dragons until 3 am and it was worth it. The mention of history and patriarchy with feminist undertones from the protagonist was just perfect. The text is not boring, although some of the dialogues were..predictable?

Matthew Perry's 'Friends' cast mates mourn their friend, say they are 'all so utterly devastated' VIEW The beautiful thing about science is we do not know what we cannot know and we will not know until we know.” How ironic that a complaint the main character has about another character is the very same problem I have with this entire novel: so wordy.

Also, the commentary on dragoning and its meaning and the inherent transness of it was breathtaking. Because this book is about transformation. Not into something else, necessarily, but into a true self. This motif is repeated throughout the novel: knots of string and twine and wire forming and unravelling, as women try to stop themselves from dragoning. There is a supernatural element to this, as on occasion Alex views her world as a mirage, changing before: In the 1950s Alexandra "Alex" Green, the only child of an absentee father and a stern housewife mother, grows up under the influence of her beloved aunt Marla. In 1955 Marla leaves Alex her texts and love letters between her and several women before disappearing during the mass dragoning event of 1955 in which women morphed into dragons. I was promised women raging, fighting oppression by turning into dragons. And instead I get a scientific yawn fest? WHY.

Then Aunt Marla disappears during a “mass dragoning” of nearly 650,000 women, leaving a baby behind. Beatrice is adopted as Alex’s “sister,” and any mention of her aunt or dragons is forbidden. Her mother begins obsessively weaving knots, and her parents cut off Alex’s friendship with a neighbor girl, who also disappears. No one will tell her why her mother disappears for months, and/or why her unmarried Aunt Marla moves in to take care of the family. Overall, a brilliant concept that failed to perform. I cannot express how much I desperately wanted to like this book.The representation of women in the 50s is very flat. I had a difficult time believing the portrayal that women are all kept housewives, completely restricted by their husbands from having any ownership of self. That their lives were utterly depressing and hopeless, that all men are evil, that all members of society happily imprison women to their homes and do not want them to be educated. This is a stereotype, a Hollywood myth, that serves the old-school flavor of feminism that the author favors in this book. There are times that this stank of TERF feminism - there's no outright TERFness but it certainly smelled similar to it. I had a very hard time believing society would cover up thousands of women turning into dragons - that it was censored from the news. Perhaps a strongly religious, cultish town would, but not national news. As Kelly Barnhill writes in When Women Were Dragons, “people are awfully good at forgetting unpleasant things.” Just look at our own world, in which willful silence around the injustices of the past affects how history is taught (or isn’t taught) in American schools. The mass dragoning meets a similar fate, but despite her best efforts, Alex Green can’t forget: “I was four years old when I first saw a dragon. I was four years old when I first learned to be silent about dragons. Perhaps this is how we learn silence—an absence of words, an absence of context, a hole in the universe where the truth should be.” I thought I was writing about a bunch of fire-breathing, powerful women. And while those women certainly are in this book, it isn’t about them. It’s about a world upended by trauma and shamed into silence. And that silence grows, and becomes toxic, and infects every aspect of life. Perhaps this sounds familiar to you now—times being what they are.”