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

Product Information

Perhaps this is how we learn silence - an absence of words, and absence of context, a hole in the universe where the truth should be. I suppose there are plenty of human-dragon metamorphoses in fantasy novels, but they aren’t what immediately came to mind when reading Kelly Barnhill’s first adult novel When Women Were Dragons – in which 642,987 American women suddenly transform into dragons on a single day in 1955. Meanwhile, alarming events are happening in her community, as women spontaneously “dragon,” erupting in a conflagration that sometimes levels buildings.

Marla, Alex’s maternal aunt, comes to care for Bertha while Alex’s father stays at the office or goes on “business trips,” a euphemism for his long-time affair with his secretary, Miss Olson. I know how it feels when your abuser deliberately cultivates an atmosphere of confusion around appropriate touch; and Newman portrays the mechanics of Jane’s grooming with pinpoint, and queasy, accuracy. Though the details differ, I too was groomed as a girl by a powerful man in my field with a sexual interest in young boys: Sidney Greenbaum, the Quain professor of English language at London University, who was convicted of his crimes in 1990. Thus, abandoned by her father, Alex is left to care for Beatrice and herself alone; both girls are still children, but now Alex must also play the role of a mother.

At family gatherings, Marla frequently discusses her sister’s many talents—namely that Bertha was an excellent mathematician who excelled in her classes and graduated college, a feat made possible only because Marla worked to put her sister through school after their parents died. That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks. Barnhill transforms that suppressed rage into a wellspring of power, creating an alternate timeline where women told to suffer in silence instead spontaneously transform into dragons, often immolating abusive men in the process.

Meanwhile, Alex examines her relationship with Beatrice while reflecting on their mothers’ complicated sisterhood. Just thinking about this book makes me smile, I love the message to it, I love how this book makes me feel, how clever it is, this book is a celebration of and a love letter to women.Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). The most rewarding part of Alex’s child­hood is her colorful Aunt Marla, a former pilot and skilled auto mechanic whose life as a gay woman in the 1950s has its own challenges, and Marla’s baby daughter Beatrice, who becomes Alex’s beloved ward. by commentators, guest bloggers, reviewers, and interviewees are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Locus magazine or its staff. As always thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for sending me an E-ARC of this title for review. Given that this is an imaginary landscape that Newman could have organized any way she chose, she’s effectively made a strong statement about where transgender people “belong”: Transgender men remain on Earth with the cisgender women.

Green because he thinks education is useless for a woman, Bertha Green because she is a wife and a mother first, and Alex because she doesn’t understand the significance. It’s the sort of scene calculated to trigger your own sense of rage, and Barnhill is consistently bril­liant at making such scenes work, whether the instigator is a school administrator, Alex’s awful father, or a clueless politician in a Congressional hearing. I particularly enjoyed the combination of dragons (ordinarily a feature of dramatic, action-packed second-world fantasy) and the upsettingly normal life of a girl who just wants to study mathematics in world that thinks she should become a secretary until she ‘lands a good husband. This novel imagines a global historical event, the Mass Dragoning of 1955, when hundreds of thousands of women worldwide transformed into dragons, and flew away, leaving behind fractured families and bewildered friends.

But every once in a while, there are experiences that slice all the other moments apart - stark, singular things that mark the difference between Before and After. 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.

We like to think we have come a long way societally (which in many regards we have) but we are still fighting the same fight. As the women work together to reconfigure the definitions of family and motherhood, Beatrice struggles to fit into a world that is not big enough to hold her. As the novel gains momentum, Barnhill uses a strategic patchwork of memoir and “interstitial” documents that fall between chapters and outside the narrator’s voice. I want to start by saying that from the first page I was hooked and was incredibly surprised this was Kelly Barnhill’s first adult novel.

Alex inherited her mother’s talent for math and science, and she struggles between her own rage at how her abilities are constantly diminished by the men around her and her resentment that her Aunt Marla became a dragon and abandoned her and Beatrice. This is a time when women stay home, cook meals, look after the house, raise the children and have a meal ready on the table for when their husband walks in the door. Alex sees a dragon for the first time when she is four years old, right around the same time her mother, Bertha Green, disappears from her home in rural Wisconsin in the early 1950s.