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

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No one know exactly what happened that night in 1952 - other than that twenty-five different people rang the operator, asking to make a collect call, only to be told, "A girl can only take so much after all." And then the line went dead.”

I was promised women raging, fighting oppression by turning into dragons. And instead I get a scientific yawn fest? WHY.Our best selves and our worst selves and our myriad iterations of mediocre selves are all extant simultaneously within a soul containing multitudes.”

testimony from the Day of the Missing Mothers: the earliest case of scientifically confirmed spontaneous dragoning. The novel is set in the U.S. and imagines an alternative history where aggrieved and persecuted women are able to transform into dragons, culminating in the 1955 mass dragoning event in which many wives and mothers were transformed. 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. This ARC is prefaced with a letter to Barnhill's readers explicating her reasons for writing the book and what she wishes readers to see and to feel. The reader is then bombarded with three inscriptions, a frontispiece, and not one but two imaginary textual artefacts (where their attribution is almost longer than the excerpt itself) before the novel proper. Chapters are then punctuated by further fabricated textual 'sources', the tone and style of which are indistinguishable from the authorial voice used in the narrative, and suffer from a similarly overbearing condescension. Kelly Barnhill goes on to specify what prompted her to write this tale. It was an allegation of historical sexual assault by the professor of psychology, Christine Blasey Ford, against the judge Brett Kavanaugh, who would later become an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. I am English, and had not been aware of this, and can’t make a proper assessment, but whatever the truth, wiki makes it clear that it was an extremely nasty and protracted case, with accusations of “victim blaming”. Kelly Barnhill is adamant, saying that:Through dragoning, this book explores trauma and the silencing that often takes place in its aftermath. It’s about how women diminish themselves to fit into the shape that society prescribes and the toxicity of secrets. It’s the power of women taking up space and refusing to be gaslit anymore. I thought I was writing a story about rage. I wasn’t. There is certainly rage in this novel, but it is about more than that. In its heart, this is a story about memory, and trauma. It’s about the damage we do to ourselves and our community when we refuse to talk about the past. It’s about the memories that we don’t understand, and can’t put into context, until we learn more about the world.” At every moment we are told exactly what to feel, "show not tell" is not considered in this novel. There is a lot of repetition early on in particular that becomes tedious to read, especially when Alex is trying to convince herself of her mother and father's lies. While I believe it was attempting to convey the level of indoctrination of society's refusal to admit dragons exist, the assertions felt out of place. Similarly, the links to real life (e.g. segregation, silencing of climate scientists, homophobic and transphobic laws) are so blunt that Barnhill is really hitting us over the head to make sure we don't miss them. A little more nuance and subtlety with the ideas would have improved the reading experience greatly. Tribune, Trisha Collopy Star. "Review: 'When Women Were Dragons,' by Kelly Barnhill". Star Tribune . Retrieved 2022-12-16. Also, the commentary on dragoning and its meaning and the inherent transness of it was breathtaking. Because this book is about transformation. Not into something else, necessarily, but into a true self.

Maybe he couldn't bear it. Maybe it hurt too much to watch her slip away. Maybe he wasn't raised to be a strong man. Maybe he loved her too much to lose her. Maybe all those things are true, and every other characterization I have for him that is ... more obvious and less kind ... perhaps those are true as well. And maybe this is the same with all of us - our best selves and our worst selves and our myriad iterations of mediocre selves are all extant simultaneously within a soul containing multitudes.” The pacing is a slog, Alex evolves from "precocius child" to "dull, pointless protagonist" soon enough, and halfway through the book I just couldn't buy her relationship to Beatrice or just about anything that involved Alex having feelings because everything about her is so souless and inconsequential. This is a book about women turning into dragons in a burst of fiery female rage and somehow manages to be boring about it - and about as subtle as a ton of briks to the head but I wouldn't have cared about that if it had been entertaining. Alas, it stopped being entertaining a third into the book. This is also a book about a resourceful smart young woman that made me absolutely hate its main character because I got very tired of Alex's specialness and informed intelligence without the author doing any work whatsoever to show us that she is at least half as smart and special as this book kept telling me she was. And then it all got fixed and wrapped in a neat little bow within the space of a handful of chapters. The end. When power belongs, not to the violent, and not to the wealthy and well-connected, but to the people, a different sort of future begins to present itself.” Alex, our main character – bright, academically inclined and with zero plans to marry in a time when keeping house and raising babies was all women were good for - was a child when the day known as The Mass Dragoning took place and her aunt sprouted wings and took to the skies. As per the blurb, Alex is forced into silence and now must live with the consequences; a mother more protective than ever, a father growing increasingly distant, a dragon obsessed cousin she must now call sister and an aunt she must forget ever existed.

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.

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. 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. The compliments, persuasive adult attention, slowly but inexorably shifting norms, being made complicit in something without the maturity to understand let alone consent to it. Jane’s complex feelings about men haunt the novel: Both her abuser and their victims were male. In the world men are warmongers but also innocent civilians. Men are more often victims of violent crime than women. The harder you look, the more intricate matters between the sexes become. Then Aunt Marla disappears during a “mass dragoning” of nearly 650,000 women, leaving a baby behind. Beatrice is adopted as Alex’s “sister,” and any mention of her aunt or dragons is forbidden. Her mother begins obsessively weaving knots, and her parents cut off Alex’s friendship with a neighbor girl, who also disappears. More than anything, this book is angry, in a deeply relatable, quietly suppressed way. The allegory of dragons as ‘women’s problems’ is sharply and skilfully woven, from the taboo against even the most euphemistic discussion, to the ingrained expectation that girls “keep their eyes on the ground” so they don’t get any lofty ideas about flying, to the plea that daughters be protected from dragon influences at school (“They asked for America to please think of the children.”) The way Alex herself plays into this dragon-related sexism is an apt example of how women replicate their own experiences to enforce patriarchal expectations: she doesn’t let her younger sister Beatrice play make-believe about dragons or talk about flying with wings, using her mother’s script. “Inappropriate.” 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. The odder things become, the more Alex is forced to pretend she doesn’t see what she sees. The silence and conformity, what one character calls a “mass forgetting,” are as suffocating as a world that uplifts men while constraining women to secondary roles.Inequality in a women’s world , in an effective tongue-in cheek manner, rather than a dogmatic, lecture style. This magical fantasy nicely explores self actualization, importance of sisterhood, What's worse is that it seems the only emotion Barnhill wants to arouse in her reader is anger. My attention, I found, was focussed upon not what was being said, but how it was being said, effectively proscribing any emotional engagement with the novel or its incitement to righteous anger. I found no rhetorical engagement in 'When Women Were Dragons'.

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