About the Book
Title: When Women Were Dragons
Author: Kelly Barnhill
Series: none
Genre: Um, not sure? Fantasy? Magical Realism? Alternate History?
Pages: 367
Edition Read: Paperback
Dates Read: January 15 – 20, 2024
Blurb: Alex Green is a young girl in a world much like ours, except for its most seminal event: the Mass Dragoning of 1955, when hundreds of thousands of ordinary wives and mothers sprouted wings, scales, and talons; left a trail of fiery destruction in their path; and took to the skies. Was it their choice? What will become of those left behind? Why did Alex’s beloved aunt Marla transform but her mother did not? Alex doesn’t know. It’s taboo to speak of.
Forced into silence, Alex nevertheless must face the consequences of this astonishing event: a mother more protective than ever; an absentee father; the upsetting insistence that her aunt never even existed; and watching her beloved cousin Bea become dangerously obsessed with the forbidden.
In this timely and timeless speculative novel, award-winning author Kelly Barnhill boldly explores rage, memory, and the tyranny of forced limitations. When Women Were Dragons exposes a world that wants to keep women small—their lives and their prospects—and examines what happens when they rise en masse and take up the space they deserve.
Review
It’s been a while since I’ve read a book that has left me feeling very confused as to how I felt about it. On one hand, I really liked it. On the other hand, it left me feeling a bit out of sorts.
Let’s start with the good things: Alex. I loved this character so much. She is faced with so many challenges and meets so much adversity head on. Losing her beloved aunt to dragoning. Losing her mother to cancer. Losing pretty much everything else because her father is a terrible, terrible person (seriously, it has been a long time since I have felt such hatred towards a character). And yet, she is absolutely brilliant, with a deeply analytical mind, determined to get her schooling and excel in life, despite being held back because she’s a girl. On top of that, she is trying to do her best to take care of her cousin-turned-sister, Beatrice. Alex is just as fierce as a dragon, despite not turning into one. She is by far the best part about this book.
It hurts to say it, but the part of the book I didn’t really like was the dragons themselves. We never really get an explanation as to why women were able to do this. It is a bit inconsistent – some could control their change, others could not. I found it incredibly strange how the world could just somehow pretend like this wasn’t a thing that happened. It was a fairly heavy-handed feminist allegory – it was something that only affected women, so it was something that was considered distasteful or taboo to talk about, but HOW DO YOU IGNORE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE TURNING INTO DRAGONS!!!
I also had a hard time picturing the dragons. They do come back into the story (I don’t think that’s really a spoiler – you wouldn’t mention a bunch of dragons and then never see them again) and they sort of fall back into normal lives, sort of? They are supposed to be really, really big (yeah, they’re dragons), but also able to do normal mundane human tasks, like gardening, cooking and building things? I kept imagining human sized dragons, which threw me off every time they mentioned how big they were supposed to be.
I think this book had a lot going for it, I really do. I appreciated the LGBTQ representation. Alex is gay (again, not really a spoiler, as you find out fairly early in the book) and there are mentions of transwomen who turn into dragons (or, as the story put it, men who ended up dragoning because they were women on the inside, or something like that). I did enjoy reading it and it kept me invested, mostly because I wanted to see what happened to Alex by the end, but I would definitely not say that it is a favorite.
GoodReads rating: 3 stars – would probably bump it to 3 1/2 if possible
Categories: Books I've Read
Life With No Plot 
This is an interesting review of this book. While I still need to read it, it’s important to hear what everyone thought about it. The fact that you wanted to like it more than you did, but couldn’t and listed the understandable reasons why makes your review one to consider while reading the book. When I do get the chance to read it, I will try to keep those things in my mind.
I did enjoy it, don’t get me wrong, and I’m very glad that I read it. This was the selection for a book club that I just joined, so it was a nice one to get to discuss.