When Women Were Dragons delighted in a completely unexpected way. At first glance, the book’s blurb seemed interesting but odd — in 1955, America experienced a ‘mass dragoning’ where hundreds of thousands of women, ordinary wives and mothers, sprouted wings, scales, talons, left smouldering damage in their wake, and took to the skies seemingly for good. In the aftermath of this event, Alex Green is haunted by many questions — why did her aunt transform while her mother did not? Why does everyone pretend the ‘mass dragoning’ never happened? How can she live knowing her life was upended by the ‘dragoning’ but unable to even admit it?
The book was so surprisingly delightful because I expected some sort of a dragon fantasy set on Earth, but what I read was a heartfelt, powerful work of magical realism and historical fiction about women bursting free. When Women Were Dragons may seem to be a fantasy novel but is really an unmistakable feminist work that uses the symbol of the dragon to signify the image of women breaking free of the limitations of their time and punishing those who had dared to hold them back. It is simply a book about women and their rights, desires, responsibilities, faculties, societal expectations, and the longing to be more than brides, wives, and mothers. It is a book about misogyny and the stubborn, wilful silence that refuses to acknowledge the truth.
In her first adult novel, Kelly Barnhill, delves deep into a heady mix of topics that plague society to this day. Through Alex’s journey from a four-year-old to a young woman determined to be a physicist despite the lack of paternal support, Barnhill exposes female oppression, the heartbreak of growing up, the lies humans concoct to cope with reality, and the struggle of refusing to be pulled down by the world around you. Although Alex sees her first dragon at a very young age and thousands of similar reports blossom all over the country, everyone refuses to acknowledge that women ‘dragoned’ because doing so would have meant acknowledging their subjugation. As Alex remembers, “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.” If no one spoke about it, it did not exist.
Controlling the narrative
Alex grows up in a world where adults are constantly fighting to control the narrative around the truth; a world where she is constantly undervalued and told to be a ‘good girl’ who listens. Her pain at losing her aunt to the ‘dragoning’ and later her mother, and being forced to step into the role of the latter at a young age, creates a void in her that she tries to fiercely protect from further deepening by controlling whatever she can. But as Barnhill beautifully writes, “There’s very little we can control in this life. All we can do is accept whatever comes, learn what we can, and hang onto what we love. And that’s it. In the end, the only thing you can hope to control is yourself. In this moment. Which is both a relief and a huge responsibility.” Her journey is a testament to sisterhood and the power of love and forgiveness. Her coming of age and maturing from a grieving girl full of unanswered questions to a woman sure of herself marks her own metaphorical ‘dragoning’.
Kelly Barnhill uses the metaphor of the dragon to represent female rage and fiery transformation. The book runs the gauntlet of emotions from indignation to sadness to joy. Though a work of fiction, it represents real stories. For every Alex that made it and every woman that ‘dragoned’, there were real women who were and are still held back from education and going after their dreams. The wild story, the poignant writing, the use of magical elements to represent social injustice, and the very emotive response it evoked in me made When Women Were Dragons a five-star read and one of my favourite books of the year.