this is a book about how hard it was to be a post-war white housewife and it fails to tread any ground left vacant by the stepford wives (doing, frankly, even less than that seminal novel), making it essentially redundant reading in 2022, when feminism, even and maybe especially righteous feminist fury, is concerned with more complex matters. Not completely unreadable, but the magical realism and lyrical tone are undermined by the second-wave-feminist unexamined, uncomplex, unintersectional tone. 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. In this timely and timeless speculative novel, award-winning author Kelly Barnhill boldly explores rage, memory, and the tyranny of forced limitations.

It’s taboo to speak of.įorced 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. 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.

The first adult novel by the Newbery award-winning author of The Girl Who Drank the Moon.Īlex 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.

A rollicking feminist 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.

When women were dragons book