DNF @ 21%

This follows a woman from childhood as she recounts the effects of "The Mass Dragoning" on her life. While I'm intrigued by the concept, its written from a retrospective angle, which makes the story feels passive to me.

I can't begin to describe how beautiful this book was. I raged, I cried, I hoped. This was so wonderful and powerful. Barnhill's dragons are a wonderful metaphor for women who have found that they deserve more and better.

Extremely well done book that will draw you in from the first few pages. Loved the story and how deep it goes.

In 1955, thousands of women around the US turned into dragons. It’s not something we talk about though. Alex, whose aunt dragoned but whose mother did not, grows up confused in this world created by the event. As her sister Beatrice shows a concerning interest in dragoning, Alex finds herself in the role of jailer and parent, desperately trying to enforce social mores she doesn’t understand.

1950s housewives turning into dragons because of feminine rage is an amazing premise. And this would have been an amazing short story. As a novel, there’s not enough substance here. Plenty of reviews already address the lack of intersectionality and the reductive approach to feminism, so I’ll content myself with addressing the narrative and my frustrations as a reader. Why that moment in time in 1955? What happened to the dragons? Throughout the book, there are more events that transpire without apparent reason or justification, and it made for a maddening read.

An empowering book that reflects a lot of injustices of our time. I have recommended this book many times at the bookshop I work at.

I appreciate feminists trying to use fiction to explore and teach feminist ideas, but this is one of those cases where the intention might be good but the end result is a shallow explanation of feminism.

This book was just not for me. Some people may enjoy it, but the only other thing I’m going to say is that this book could’ve been a wonderful short story.

This book really hit home, there were a lot of really incredible messages within this wonderful story.

I adored the concept; I adored the metaphors and the magical realism; I especially adored the purpose of this book, but I just can’t help but feel like it wasn’t very well done. Considering how much I love feminist, dystopian, not-quite-Margaret Atwood -like books, this should’ve been right up my alley, but it just didn’t quite strike home.

The narrative was interesting— the historical journal of a child during this occurrence, and of course I love a good magical realism world. A mass-dragooning? Count me in. But the representation and portrayal of characters felt flat. I didn’t feel connected, or like there was any reason to care. I just can’t help but thing this could’ve been better.

Thank you to Netgalley for the advanced copy of this book!

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.

This is a book about dragons, about women, about freedom, about transformation, and on and on. While the title of the book certainly grabs you, it can be a bit misleading. I found some parts repetitive and unnecessary. The premise is original and the historical aspect was interesting. I think having a character other than Alex as the POV would have been better for the pacing of the book. There were definitely times I thought the story could end and be completed (yet I had many more pages to go).

This book aired on the side of being preachy and unsubtle in a way that destroyed the world of the book. I finished reading it because I wanted to see how it would end and where it would take me with the characters. I had a lot of hope and the story had a lot of potential, but it fell flat in too many places to be a favorite. This book may be great for some, but not everyone.

This book has been on my TBR list for a while, so I figured it might be a good one to tackle finally, especially given how I've been feeling about the world politically and socially at the moment. While this book did occasionally rile me up with some of the injustices and inequities, it was a much more relaxed read than I had been expecting, largely due to the lectures/textbook pages/interviews that come between chapters. I think it was also a clever way to highlight that, even during times of great change, a lot of people will try to keep the world going the exact same way as it was, often even trying to ignore the change in an effort to make it go away. Their efforts to prevent and hold off change turn into an insidious creeping effort to prevent progress, but in the end, progress tends to win out.

Okay enough with the philosophy stuff and on to the book review. So the things I loved: the narration style, especially how it progressed from Alex as a young child so confused by the changes in the world around her and especially by the fact that the adults in her life won't explain what's happening. Her frustration was so visceral and hit me hard, taking me back to my own childhood memories of not understanding some big scary things in the world and dearly wanting someone to just explain it in a way I could understand instead of telling me "you'll understand when you're older." I loved watching Alex grow throughout the book, her fraught relationships with the adults around her, the heartbreak that comes with childhood and growing up and loss, and her yearning to learn and know more about almost everything. I especially loved Beatrice, wild and exuberate and untetherable as a cloud, and the care and love Alex felt for her was so evident and raw at times, especially once her dad off-loaded Bea's care directly on to Alex (if ever I could have reached into a book and pummeled a character, it would've been Alex's dad. Just the idea of putting your teenage daughter in a crappy apartment and telling her to take care of herself and a literal child made me absolutely livid. And the fact that stuff like that happened to real people in the past (and probably even now in some cases) just makes me want to turn into a dragon and burn the world down). Also Alex's anger, at her mother for disappearing for a while, at her aunt for stepping in to help take care of her but not being her mother, at her father for being just the absolute worst throughout most of her life, at her teachers and principals for trying to stifle her creativity and personality, and at the world itself for trying to stick everything they didn't like in a box and forget about it. But I especially felt her anger after the dragons returned and her aunt was once again back in her life. That betrayal, that loss, that pain at having lost her aunt once, then having lost her mother, then her father virtually abandoning her with a young child to take care of, the world constantly beating her down and trying to make her fit their ideals, and then the dragons return and her aunt seems almost blithe about the things Alex had to go through, mostly alone. I know part of her aunt's behaviour was probably an effort to try and push through her own sense of guilt and loss and an urge to help Alex and Beatrice even if Alex said she didn't want the help. But I understood Alex's feelings of anger and betrayal that this person she loved had left her and now was suddenly back and almost wanted to act as if what she'd done was fine. I liked getting to see a lot of the dragons having to deal with the messes they left when they dragoned and left their old lives behind. I understand why most of them left and why they probably felt like leaving was the right thing for everyone, but seeing that collateral damage from even good-intentioned choices was important.

And now the things that I didn't quite love but still liked: the slower pace of the novel itself. While the overall premise of the book made me think everything would be big and fantastical, I actually liked that things were smaller and more focused on the minutiae of life despite the strange goings on. The idea that the government and society itself would try to ignore and paste over a mass dragoning of women didn't surprise me at all; I wasn't exactly expecting that to be the case when I started the book, but it made a lot of sense within the context of the story. Even now, with all our technology capturing things live and unfiltered, there are still plenty of people who want to ignore or cover up obvious problems in our world instead of facing them head-on. I will say that the last third of the book had me hooked pretty well and kept me reading long past when I should've gone to bed, but the slow build at times didn't always leave me eager to pick up the story again. But overall, I did enjoy the slower pace because it fit so well with the themes and feel of the book, despite my initial expectations.

So if you'd like a literary novel with some fantasy elements, some biting commentary on society, and girls and women who march to the beat of their own drum and thumb their nose at society's expectations, give this book a try. I found it quite cathartic at times. And oh how I wish I could turn dragon and fly away from things at time.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me early access to this book in exchange for an honest review.

I’m a little surprised by just how much I loved this book. It’s got so much going on in it, and yet it’s also a very simple story about growing up.

The writing makes you feel the incandescent rage the characters feel at the injustices, the obtuse and petty slights piling up over time, and at the same time doesn’t avoid the question of whether or not acting on those feelings is selfish. On what must be given up in exchange, and if it’s worth it. And it has me seriously wondering what choice I’d make if this was my world.

I would agree with some other reviewers this is a divisive book. I DNFed unfortunately, which is rare for me. There is A LOT to like and unpack here, but I think it is a book to read when you’re at a specific time in your life.

I loved this book (although I don't appear to be in the majority here). Thank you so much for sending it to me!

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me free access to the digital advanced copy of this book.

I've tried a couple of books by this author now and I think she just might not be for me.

This is supposed to be her first adult book, but the main character was a child, teenager or college student for most of the book. It didn't feel very adult to me.

I guess that for me, there didn't seem to be much subtlety in the book. Women are oppressed! They turn into dragons to escape oppression! (But sometimes come back.) Should I turn into a dragon? Why do I/don't I want to?

I got about 50 pages into the book and it hadn't grabbed me. I didn't like the main character's mother, who seemed like her whole deal was to deny her worth so that she could fit a "traditional housewife" role. None of the men in the book that I'd met so far were worth meeting- they were there to show how horrible men are to women. And I'm not sure why the book was set in the 50's except that it was a time where women did not have a lot of rights.

I also just don't get how over half a million women in the USA alone can change into dragons, killing quite a few people along the way, and no one ever talks about it or acknowledges that it even happened. It felt like a very American book, very white too. Not many folks of color, not anything happening outside of small town America.

The writing was decent but I just didn't end up caring about what happened next. I feel like I've read this story before. Other reviewers have mentioned that this might have been better as a short story, and I think I'd agree.

I COULD NOT LOVE THIS BOOK MORE!

This was such a powerful and profound book. I both read and listened to the audio of it and was moved both times. The character development, the incredibly original story, everything was like a chef's kiss.

Maybe it was the time in my life when I read it, as I was going through upheaval but this book spoke to me on so many emotional levels.

“You will tell people that you did not raise me to be an angry woman, and that statement will be correct. I was never allowed to be angry, was I? My ability to discover and understand the power of my own raging was a thing denied to me. Until, at last, I learned to stop denying myself.”

WHEN WOMEN WERE DRAGONS is a historical speculative fiction novel, imagining a world where hundreds of thousands of women suddenly transform into dragons in the U.S. in the 1950s. Interspersed within the narrative of the main character Alex is a history of so-called dragoning before this time and scientific explorations into its causes and machinations.

I liked this book, and I think it could have gone further. Though the premise is explosive, the execution is slower, softer, more intimate; it’s about a girl and her mother, the aunt she mourns the loss of, the cousin who becomes her sister, and the feeling of family that often eludes her. I thought the setting was powerful: there’s a lot to say about the conservatism of the era, the persistence of racism and xenophobia, the suppression of anything with a whisper of communism, the ongoing silencing of women and queer people, and I liked the parallels the author drew. From that context, it’s hard not to enjoy dames becoming fire-breathing monsters, incinerating their abusive husbands and bosses, razing their workplaces to the ground, and freeing themselves of the oppressive constraints of post-war conservative gender norms. It’s a not a phenomenon exclusive to cis women either.

But after all that, many of the dragons seemingly just return to normal society! They come home, they clean, they get jobs, they try to get their husbands back. Ladies! Fly out and find a new home! Establish an anarcho-syndicalist nation run by massive lizard lesbians! I found the trajectory of the story wanting, with a very white lady second-wave feminism vibe despite the author’s clear intentions. Perhaps she was aiming for a more realistic picture of this dragon-filled world. I did very much enjoy the vision of sapphic polyamorous dragon aunties who spend their days making bricks, baking bread, and reading books; you can sign me right up for that.

There’s a lot of beautiful writing here about anger and discovery and loneliness and memory and the infinite variety of relationships between women. Something about it just didn’t totally come together for me. A powerful book nonetheless. Thanks to Doubleday Books for the eARC.

Content warnings: sexism, misogyny, death of a parent, parental abandonment, cancer, grief, homophobia/lesbophobia

Magical realism or historical fantasy isn’t a genre that I reach for often, but I simply couldn’t pass up Kelly Barnhill’s venture into adult lit. Having absolutely loved The Witch’s Boy, I knew from the get-go that I can bet on it’s magnificent lyrical prose and hard-hitting passages. I was not disappointed.

When Women Were Dragons is a fierce and unapologetic feminist manifesto wrapped in a gentle yet unflinching prose. Set in 1950s, after the first mass Dragoning (a world wide event during which hundreds of thousands of women shapeshifted into fire breathing Dragons and took to the skies, oftentimes after having consumed their unfortunate husbands), it’s a story filled with relevant and important themes and messages. Alex is a young girl who just lost her mother to cancer. Her aunt was one of the women who Dragonned, and so she is now the sole caregiver to her cousin (Bea), mainly because her father couldn’t be bothered to care for them anymore, now that he started a new family with his mistress.

Alex’s life is full of moments of utter heartbreak. She is ambitious and determined to study math, she does not want to settle for the kind of life her father and other men in her life would have her live. This girl is a fighter, and she’ll do whatever it takes to escape the shackles of patriarchy.

And yet, and yet. The punches keep coming and she faces more than just one obstacle - all of them painful, all of them heartbreaking. But there is also hope and sense of support from other women, a nearly magical thread of understanding and mutual uplifting that only women can offer each other. And it’s a phenomenal thing to witness. I loved the fierce women of this story, for they were all dragons in one way or another. I loved the librarian, I loved Bea, I loved the old Polish lady who called Alex “zabko” and offered her little gifts and treasures.

I loved this book in a way I loved only Lessons in Chemistry, and if you enjoyed that one, you’ll love WWWD, too.

Thank you to Netgalley and Doubleday Books for sending me a copy of this book! All opinions are my own!

For starters, I absolutely loved the style of this book. It's like a historical memoir, and that just adds so much to the story and the intrigue of it all. The writing style makes everything so much more believable and really grounds you in the "reality" of it all. I loved the way we got to see the world, but because the narrator is so young for most of it, I ended up wanting more information about the world and the mysterious dragons.

I really loved the themes of feminism and identity. There was so much depth to the healing and growth throughout the book, and I loved revealing the parallels between the book and our own reality. It's a book that really makes you stop and think about the world and what you want from it, how you can shape it, and your place within all of it.

I do wish that there had been a bit more action for a book with dragons, and the way that all the adults were just so miserably horrible made it hard for me to engage with at first.

If you are a fan of historical fiction, you definitely should check this out!