Later reports—at least, those that were publicly acknowledged—omitted a key detail about this mass disappearance. 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. 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.

I read a quick review (I avoid anything long until I’ve read it myself) a couple of days before I started it, that said When Women Were Dragons is ‘a wonderful ode to the strength and resilience of women, who have been transforming into dragons for centuries. While it is true that there is a freedom in forgetting - and this country has made great use of that freedom - there is a tremendous power in remembrance. I loved the originality in using dragons as a metaphor for women expressing themselves, freeing themselves from having to conform to limiting or stereotypical gender roles. The use of such a literary device thus creates a world that is convincingly realistic, especially when Barnhill crafts an element of censorship by presenting textual “evidence” whose facts are redacted, obscured, and actively suppressed by those who prefer to deny both the existence of dragons and the reasons for their transformation.

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.

In one later scene, during a protest, a Dragoned protestor is holding a sign that reads “My Body, My Choice” and **** if that didn’t feel familiar. The writing style is easy to get your teeth into (no dragon pun), the characters likeable and good (mostly) but not perfect which makes them feel like someone you know. As women around the world inexplicably transform into dragons, a young girl struggles to take care of her cousin in 1950s America. Like Newman, Barnhill intersperses a variety of fictional “found texts” throughout her narrative, and they make for enjoyable and very funny sketches.Earlier books include The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction (Eaton Award, 1981), Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever (with Ellen Weil, 2002), and David Lindsay (1982). This may be one reason Barnhill chose to set her tale in the 1950s and early 1960s, a period in which the pressure cookers of feminism and civil rights were notably building up steam in the United States.

A friend who happened to watch me as I read this section told me my face changed shape almost beyond recognition. Instead, I was reminded of Ionesco’s 1959 play Rhinoceros, in which the residents of a small town all gradually turn into rhinoceroses. If cisgender men and transgender women all disappeared, would this solve the modern world’s most pressing crises? Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South. The pacing can seem a little slow in the start, but throughout it worked well, adding in to Alex’s narrative, historical accounts, newspaper articles and snippets from the wonderful Dr.Dragons are elected to office, run corporations, and build communities to make the world a better place. Completely fierce, unmistakably feminist, and subversively funny, When Women Were Dragons brings the heat to misogyny with glorious imagination and talon-sharp prose.

In her first novel for adult readers, Kelly Barnhill, bestselling and Newbery Medal-winning author of The Girl Who Drank the Moon, offers the same sort of magic she’s brought to her middle grade readers for years. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Others think that a piece of paper to say you are clever isn't much use when you are a mother and wife.Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world. If much of the novel feels like a full-throated howl, an indictment of a system of gender apartheid, an alchemy occurs in the final chapters. Set in an alternate 1950/60’s America, where on a single day in 1955, thousands upon thousands of women spontaneously transform into Dragons, it’s such a shock to the patriarchy that it’s forbidden to talk about. This is a time when women stay home, cook meals, look after the house, raise the children and have a meal ready on the table for when their husband walks in the door. Which brings us back to the question: If women were to turn into dragons and slaughter the men who have enraged them, would justice necessarily be served?