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

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Overall, this was a powerfully moving, feminist and wonderfully queer coming of age story that I absolutely LOVED! Because it’s such a forbidden topic, to the extent that scientists who study the dragon transformations are silenced by the government, no one really understands why “dragooning” happens or how it works. Written on the heels of that bruising Supreme Court battle, and before the current “Don’t Say Gay” laws and push to ban books, “When Women Were Dragons” reminds us how difficult it is to put the knowledge of freedom back into the bottle and the cost to a society that tries. Named one of the best fantasy/science fiction books of 2022 by Kirkus Reviews, When Women Were Dragons is Barnhill’s first full-length adult novel. Written by Kelly Barnhill and published in 2022, When Women Were Dragons is a work of speculative fiction with all the trappings of a realistic novel.

Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. With books you can be anything, the possibilities are infinite, and I am so glad Kelly Barnhill chose to make us dragons. Barnhill has such a way with words, Alex was such a clear and easy character to read and Beatrice was incredibly vibrant, too!My criticisms are very minor and easily resolved in that this book doesn’t cover dragons in much detail. Conformity does become another important theme for Barnhill, not so much in terms of the ‘‘dragoning’’ itself, as in the response to it from government, schools, and other institutions. It is like a piece of yarn, in which each section of the strand twists and winds around every other - a complicated and complex knot, in which one part cannot be viewed out of context from the others. Alex Green lives in an America very much like the one that exists today—except that in her world, dragons exist. 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.

Then Aunt Marla disappears during a “mass dragoning” of nearly 650,000 women, leaving a baby behind.Meanwhile, alarming events are happening in her community, as women spontaneously “dragon,” erupting in a conflagration that sometimes levels buildings. I loved the way it explored that pressure and the burden it put on people, Alex's journey through protective denial and how it all spiralled into messy emotions at the end. The Seattle Times does not append comment threads to stories from wire services such as the Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post or Bloomberg News.