On April 25, 1955, 642,987 American women became dragons. Thus began When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill, a satirical feminist fable against McCarthy, Nixon, Reagan, prejudice, and the patriarchy. An optimistic vision of a future where strong women take charge and make a difference. A book for 2025. My most enjoyable read of the year.
One might imagine that large, flying, fire-breathing, bullet-proof dragons (“and no fewer than 1,246 confirmed cases of philandering husbands extracted from the embrace of their mistresses and devoured on the spot”) might make life easy, but this book is not that simplistic. The “dragonings” didn’t include everyone, and those left behind when their mother, daughter, or friend transformed had many complicated feelings of grief and abandonment to work through.
The main character is Alex Green. “When Women Were Dragons Being the Truthful Accounting of the Life of Alex Green—Physicist, Professor, Activist. Still Human. A memoir, of sorts.” Her aunt Marla dragoned. Her mother died of cancer. Her father abandoned her to remarry and then died. She was responsible for her young cousin, Beatrice. Her best friend, Sonja, also dragoned. Her primary supporter was Mrs. Gyzinska.
Mrs. Helen Gyzinska, librarian, philanthropist, and influencer (“became head librarian and chief commissioner for the county system when she was only twenty-four years old, and maintained the library’s excellence until the day she died”). She stood up to McCarthy and the House Unamerican Activities Committee. “All I know is that we all just spent a lot of damn time learning nothing of consequence, except what it feels like to get your ass handed to you by a goddamned librarian. ... It turned out that the librarian in question was the single largest funder of her own library’s system, and managed a high-yield endowment that would keep the organization not only flush with cash but wealthy enough that it regularly handed generous grants to other, more needy districts. She was, it seemed, untouchable. She faced no penalties and served no time. She simply returned to her library.” “I hear even J. Edgar Hoover is scared of her.”
Alex’s mother was a mathematician who studied knot theory and crocheted magical knots.
The conservatives opposed transformed dragons (like LGBTQ+ people).
NOTABLE QUOTES…
“We were old enough to know that the posters warning of reefer madness were fully bogus and that there were plenty of girls who went parking with boys in cars and still maintained their grade-point averages and their status in school. There were a lot of falsehoods in this world, and it seemed a large percentage of them were posted in hallways and announced on the school’s PA system. I tuned them out.”
“There is no greater moment for a scientist than to be proved wrong or to be alive at a time when settled science is turned on its head.”
Mr. Burrows. “He … kept a basket of yarn and crochet hooks at his desk. He did experiments making hyperbolic planes and Möbius loops and topographical conundrums and something called a snark and various three-dimensional approximations of four-dimensional objects.”
Alex Green. “My name written in scripty
letters. Highest honors. Despite the loss of my mother. Despite my father’s
abandonment and abdication. Despite raising an irascible little girl all alone.
Despite the deep wound of grief. Despite everything.”
“He had one blurry photograph of a woman halfway through her dragoning. Her hands were clouds. Her dress hung in strips. There was a look of fierce joy on her face.”
The author is from Minnesota.
Check out https://amazon.com/shop/influencer-20171115075 for Omega Cats Press books and book recommendations.
