I couldn't wait to put this book down and move onto something more challenging and less belaboured.

This book starts MANY conversations about what being a woman means and, more specifically, what being a woman in the United States is like. In a way, it's a picture in time where you get to see all kinds of treatment women have collectively received and how some have chosen to accept it, some like it, and some struggle under a patriarchal system that strives to invisibilize and minimize them. Jane’s story too is deeply troubling. At 16, she was groomed by the older director of her ballet troupe, Alain, who taught her to seduce — to abuse — boys as young as 13 so he could watch them having sex. When it came to trial it was harder to prosecute Alain than Jane; after all, he hadn’t touched the victims. Jane is branded a criminal and left destroyed: “I will never be whole, I can never feel good.” Then Aunt Marla disappears during a “mass dragoning” of nearly 650,000 women, leaving a baby behind. Beatrice is adopted as Alex’s “sister,” and any mention of her aunt or dragons is forbidden. Her mother begins obsessively weaving knots, and her parents cut off Alex’s friendship with a neighbor girl, who also disappears. No, this would not have suited me, nor perhaps you, but the world was a different place then. The burning, building rage that is described is transposed from the perceptions of a 21st century woman. It is just not that simple. It’s also worth pointing out that these conditions still apply today, for some, and are not consigned to the history books. The USA today even has a term, “stay-at-home mom”, for those women who choose to do so, although the UK does not adhere to this concept.

As the narrator is young and confused, for at least 3/4 of the book, we unfortunately don't get to experience dragoning in a way that is satisfying. Every potentially powerful moment is shown to us so passively that this book loses any hope of igniting the spark this concept promised. Overall, this was a powerfully moving, feminist and wonderfully queer coming of age story that I absolutely LOVED!

When I was a little girl, they told us to keep our eyes on the ground. They told us not to ask about the houses that burned. They told us to forget. And we were good children. We followed the rules. As Kelly Barnhill writes in When Women Were Dragons, “people are awfully good at forgetting unpleasant things.” Just look at our own world, in which willful silence around the injustices of the past affects how history is taught (or isn’t taught) in American schools. The mass dragoning meets a similar fate, but despite her best efforts, Alex Green can’t forget: “I was four years old when I first saw a dragon. I was four years old when I first learned to be silent about dragons. Perhaps this is how we learn silence—an absence of words, an absence of context, a hole in the universe where the truth should be.” Keep your eyes on the ground. You don’t want any dangerous ideas. Perhaps this is how we learn silence - an absence of words, an absence of context, a hole in the universe where the truth should be. This is Alex’s memoir (of sorts). Alex saw her first dragon when she was four. She was still a child when the Mass Dragoning happened. Through her eyes, we not only see how the Mass Dragoning changed society as a whole but also how it impacted upon Alex’s own family. Barnhill transforms that suppressed rage into a wellspring of power, creating an alternate timeline where women told to suffer in silence instead spontaneously transform into dragons, often immolating abusive men in the process.Overall, a brilliant concept that failed to perform. I cannot express how much I desperately wanted to like this book. The one thing I would say is that this book is being marketed as YA but, personally, it read as adult. Everything about it, from the tone to the themes to the way it followed through so much of Alex's life, felt like adult to me.

Alex was a child when the day known only as The Mass Dragoning took place and her aunt sprouted wings and took to the skies, but her mother is determined to forget. Forced into silence Alex now must live with the consequences; a mother more protective than ever, a father growing increasingly distant, a dragon obsessed cousin she must now call sister and an aunt she must forget ever existed… We can probably guess the unmentionable topic in the 1950s concerning Alex’s mother she had cancer, but it seems extraordinary for there to be silence about such a momentous event as the Mass Dragoning. With the disappearance of so many women—and even a tiny number of men—society had changed overnight. Most families had someone in their circle, or knew of someone who had dragoned, leaving a hole in their lives.When Alex is 15 her mother dies from a recurrence of breast cancer. Her father immediately marries his secretary, whom he had been having an affair with, and moves Alex and Beatrice into a small apartment. Alex keeps the secret of their living conditions as long as her father continues to financially provide for her but learns that he intends to cut support as soon as she graduates from high school. While her father pushes her to join the workforce or marry, Alex, who is gifted in mathematics, is determined to go to college. The silence and conformity – “mass forgetting” are as suffocating as a world that uplifts men while constraining women to secondary roles.