A good knot requires presence of mind to make, and can act as a unshakable force in a shaky, unstable world.” Alex, while attending university, reluctantly gives her sister Beatrice permission to fully dragon. Her sister goes on to become a Nobel Peace Prize winner while Alex becomes a scientist. There is very little I don’t love about this book. The prose is luscious, the setting - 1950/60s USA - is atmospheric in it’s stiflingly wilful silence, and the arc of Alex, the main character, is heartwarming and heartbreaking in equal measure. 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. The pains and struggles of women are not glided over in this book but women are not made victims either. The writing style is easy to get your teeth into (no dragon pun), the characters likeable and good (mostly) but not perfect which makes them feel like someone you know. Alex’s Aunt Marla was one of the disappeared women. She was also one of the most influential people in Alex’s life; after all, Marla gave birth to Alex’s cousin and best friend, Beatrice. After Marla’s dragoning, Alex’s parents raised the two girls as sisters, but questions about Marla’s disappearance lingered at the edges of Alex’s consciousness.

R.F. Kuang, Sue Lynn Tan, Rebecca Ross, Kate Heartfield, N.E. Davenport, Saara El-Arifi, Juno Dawson and Sunyi Dean No one will tell her why her mother disappears for months, and her unmarried Aunt Marla moves in to take care of the family. Or why her father disappears into his work, sometimes not returning home at night.There was a sign, written in what appeared to be ashes on a piece of discarded desktop. It said SMART DRESSES FOR SMART GALS. WEAR UNTIL THIS LIFE NO LONGER FITS YOU. No one knew what it meant.” This is a story of women and the universe, and all the ways we lie to each other to try to cope with reality and unreality, and the hypocritical normalcy of the 1950s and early 1960s. Of puns and euphemisms and saying without saying. Of mothers and daughters and aunts and cousins and first loves and growing up and figuring shit out. Of first loves and first losses. Of not just breaking outside of societal conventions, but smashing them completely and making something new. Of grief and joy and everything that comes in between. Of turning perceived weakness into impenetrable strength.

The story opens in a small Wisconsin town, where Alex, a budding scientist, grows up in a household full of secrets.If much of the novel feels like a full-throated howl, an indictment of a system of gender apartheid, an alchemy occurs in the final chapters . . . Kelly Barnhill reimagines a world where women face 1950s-style constraints, and find a path out.” Shortly before Alex is due to graduate her aunt Marla, still in dragon form, reappears and her father dies. There is also a second mass dragoning of girls between the ages of 10 and 19. With more dragons choosing to stay with their families dragons become more commonly accepted. We can probably guess the unmentionable topic in the 1950s concerning Alex’s mother she had cancer, but it seems extraordinary for there to be silence about such a momentous event as the Mass Dragoning. With the disappearance of so many women—and even a tiny number of men—society had changed overnight. Most families had someone in their circle, or knew of someone who had dragoned, leaving a hole in their lives. 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.

It is also a lovely metaphor for the ties that bind us to our lives we have chosen, and also the ties that hold us down. 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: Set in 1950's small town America for the most part, our protagonist is Alex who (like her mother before her) loves mathematics and can't see why that's an issue for a girl. In a society where options for women are severely limited, another way forward emerges - a mass Dragoning, women and girls literally shedding their skins and becoming something Other, often with disastrous effect for those who had provoked or caused that change by their behaviour. There are other truly wonderful characters that I adored, in particular the local librarian, Mrs. Gyzinska, who was Alex’s biggest supporter and whose own story I would love to read as a companion novel.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.” Alex’s fire and desire for answers never dies and only intensifies as she grows into a fiercely independent teenager in the era of the Mass Dragoning. Society turning in on itself, a mother more protective than ever; the upsetting and confusing insistence that Marla never even existed and watching her beloved Beatrice becoming dangerously obsessed with the forbidden.

Kelly Barnhill couldn’t have realized when she wrote When Women Were Dragons how prescient it would be when it went on sale this month…Barnhill’s prose is gorgeous and powerful.” I really liked Alex, our protagonist/main POV character and loved that the plot acts as a sort of memoir to Alex who tells us her story—from her childhood, her experience of the mass dragoning and how such an event affected the lives of those left behind.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.” Completely fierce, unmistakably feminist, and subversively funny." —Bonnie Garmus, bestselling author of Lessons in Chemistry Barnhill relaxes into her characters, and it’s here that “When Women Were Dragons” really sings. The stakes feel more genuine as Alex navigates her first relationship and also grapples with letting Beatrice, whom she has parented for years, find her own path.