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

Product Information

I look forward to seeing what else this author comes up with, after this, as hers will be a name I'll definitely check out. Gyzinska, who was Alex’s biggest supporter and whose own story I would love to read as a companion novel. 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.

Slowly, however, as parents begin to welcome their daughters, wives, and mothers back home, dragons make their way into mainstream society.Suddenly, Alex no longer has a niece but a younger sister even as her mother's health deteriorates and eventually Alex is left to become an adult way too soon. Then Aunt Marla disappears during a “mass dragoning” of nearly 650,000 women, leaving a baby behind. We rely on reader donations to keep the magazine and site going, and would like to keep the site paywall free, but WE NEED YOUR FINANCIAL SUPPORT to continue quality coverage of the science fiction and fantasy field. The one thing I would say is that this book is being marketed as YA but, personally, it read as adult.

Surely it’s not gender but inequality that is important: When any one group holds power over another, some will always abuse it. The most rewarding part of Alex’s child­hood is her colorful Aunt Marla, a former pilot and skilled auto mechanic whose life as a gay woman in the 1950s has its own challenges, and Marla’s baby daughter Beatrice, who becomes Alex’s beloved ward. Marla leaves behind her child Beatrice, only a toddler, and Alex’s mother raises the child as her own.But I am a scientist, sirs, and my allegiance is not to this body, nor even to myself, but only to the truth. In 1955 Marla leaves Alex her texts and love letters between her and several women before disappearing during the mass dragoning event of 1955 in which women morphed into dragons. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life.