Impossible Things *Could* Have Been Thus
'When Women Were Dragons' is fueled by history's missed chances — and by the heartbreak of hard choices
Within about an hour of opening Kelly Barnhill’s 2022 adult fantasy When Women Were Dragons, I was already thinking: I have got to put a copy of this into the hands of every woman I have ever known. (Adding, a heartbeat later, …and every girl, for that matter.) I wish I could remember who first recommended it so I could thank them personally.
I’m gonna try to keep this review as spoiler-free as I can; I knew very little about the book when I started it, and had never read anything else by Barnhill. For now, just know that I recommend it without hesitation. But if you’re not willing to take my word for it, and why should you?, go ahead: read on.
The story begins in the mid-1950s, in the small town in Wisconsin where the protagonist-narrator grew up. She is one Alexandra Greene, a precocious little girl in postwar, middle-class America. Other than bristling at the constraints of her everyday family life (her name is not Alexandra, she tells everyone, it’s Alex), she has, well, Not Much Drama going on. Her businessman father drinks, yes, and he seems to go on an awful lot of business trips. Her mother also works, and seems obsessed by the tying of knots (whose topologies she records in a little notebook). She also has a formidable aunt, Marla — a former World War II WASP.
But her “normal” family is turned upside-down principally by two events:
First, Aunt Marla gives birth to a child, a daughter named Beatrice, who quickly becomes not just Alex’s constant companion but, well, her favorite person in the world.
And second… well, all right, here is one big spoiler, the biggest — or it would be, if not already revealed in the book’s quite literal title:
This is what we know:
On April 25, 1955, between the hours of 11:45 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. central time, 642,987 American women—wives and mothers, all—became dragons. All at once. A mass dragoning. The largest in history.
My mother was not among the women who dragoned on April 25, 1955. But my aunt Marla was. The distribution of dragoning across the country was haphazard and unpredictable. Six children in my third-grade class had mothers who dragoned. In the grade above me, only two children had mothers who were lost. The grade behind had twelve. There were towns hit hard by the dragoning, and towns that were blessedly untouched. The reasons why remain a mystery. Even now.
A few things to unpack here:
The 1955 timeframe is very important (more on this below); ditto the day of the week. But I think so is the more granular mid-day time, in a three-hour window of time on what was then a Monday: women, married or otherwise, who were (as they said) “homemakers” back then were not busy getting children out the door or answering to the needs of men (husbands or otherwise). Single women and others out in the working world, relegated to subordinate and generally low-paying jobs — secretaries, cashiers, waitresses — had little choice but to answer to the needs of men.
The “dragoning” occurred mysteriously: sudden, unevenly distributed, and unplanned.
Apparently, only women dragoned. And while over 600,000 women is a lot of people in any year, in 1955 it would have comprised less than 2% of the US female population. And yet: damn, that’s a lot of women. (Imagine, say, a thousand people suddenly transforming into giant reptiles in a typical football stadium.)
Side note: I don’t think the book explicitly says anything about dragonings elsewhere than in the United States on that day. But events, especially later in the book’s narrative, certainly suggest it wasn’t confined to the US.
Effects of the dragoning were widespread and permanent, certainly on a personal or family level. But consider too the mid-’50s culture of the US at large. World War II and international chaos remained fresh in everyone’s memories; meanwhile, imaginary domestic threats — communism, the burgeoning civil and women’s rights movements, and simple change of any kind — threatened the “happy” stability which a white patriarchy had grown comfortable with (and imagined to be necessary).
Something as impossible to ignore as a sudden random and very non-imaginary dragoning of hundreds of thousands of people certainly rocked the country’s social and political foundations. The House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC) refocused its work from an investigation of communist and socialist dangers to probe the origins (and probably conspiracies!) behind the mass dragoning. Scientists who studied it were blacklisted. The very subject was verboten in classrooms and churches, around dinner tables and on news programs. Nice People Didn’t Talk About Such Things. And if, by some chance, you should encounter one of the dragoned out on the street — well, if you knew what was good for you, you’d just walk around it, and tell no one.
The important, the critical point I think in appreciating this book: the dragons aren’t the point. After all, how could this happen? People can’t physically suddenly shape-shift into large, scaly, fire-breathing winged reptiles, right? And even if they could, then surely they couldn’t actually take flight — what about the laws of physics?!?
Barnhill’s characters don’t ignore such questions. Indeed, some of them are researchers who’ve been studying the questions for decades. They simply don’t (yet) know… and (again) it doesn’t matter anyway.
Why not? Because When Women Were Dragons isn’t about dragons as such. It’s about the place of outrageous, entirely visible and invulnerable misfits in a homogeneous society which resists honoring obvious facts of life.
Most importantly, to me, all this takes place in a story in which people alternately but regularly break one another’s hearts and enrage one another. Dragoning doesn’t follow from some outward pressure to change or to remain the same; it’s fueled by exquisite joy and exquisite rage. It’s a choice. And inevitably, as with many such major choices, the one to dragon comes with a long, sharp needle of uncertainty and exquisite pain. Consider this passage, in which Alex comforts her niece (they’ve come to regard themselves as sisters) after realizing, to her horror, that she (Alex) has betrayed her:
“Do you want me to tell you a story?” I asked. [Beatrice] didn’t respond, but that didn’t matter. I closed my eyes, too much of a coward to hold her gaze. Did I know to feel shame yet? I think deep down, I probably did. “Once upon a time,” I said, “there were two sisters. Both good. Both bad. Equal parts of each. They took care of one another, and worked hard, and both tried their best, and mostly it was good enough. They loved each other so, so much. One day, they heard the dragons’ call. ‘Come with us,’ the dragons said. ‘Come play with us. Be one with us.’ The dragons called and called and they would not shut up. One sister answered the call. She took off her skin. She stepped out of her life. She became a dragon. The other sister didn’t. She had work to do and people to care for and things to learn. She loved the world and everything in it and didn’t want to leave her life behind. She stayed as she was, but she missed her sister, more and more each day, a great yawning sadness, until she couldn’t bear it anymore. Her heart broke in half and she died of sorrow. The end.”
And there are plenty of little asides, nothing to do with the plot per se, which bring pleasure on their own. Like:
Mr. Wyatt [a cruel former boss of a factory worked by women] died in prison. He was buried under a simple wooden cross, but this was burned to ashes by an unknown assailant, several months later.
Enough: this book holds plenty of great yawning sadness, and also the call of life finally full, and finally one’s own. It really rocked me. Maybe it will rock you, too?
It sounds like a book I must read.
Thank you for sending me scurrying to my favorite local bookstore (LaPlaya Books in San Diego) to order my hard-cover copy (I tend to save my money for paperbacks, ebooks, or library books.) I generally read a book straight through until done, but this book captivated me, made me want it to last, and so I reluctantly closed it night after night, knowing I would be rewarded with something completely new the next day.
The writing can be a bit heavy handed at times, particularly in the last third, but the hopefulness and optimism ring true. Thank you, John Simpson, for bringing this book to my attention. I am in your debt. And I am in debt to Kelly Barnhill and the characters she has created. Marta Perone-Bacon, this is, indeed, a book you must read.