Book Review: When Women Were Dragons

Here’s my book review for When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill. Don’t forget to leave a comment if you’ve read it too. And check out today’s writing prompt at the bottom of this post.

When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill was an interesting read and captivated my attention for the most part. However, it was more a coming-of-age story during a specific misogynistic time in history than it was a story about feminism or strong women and what they can accomplish overall. To me, it ended up being a story about how women had to continue to endure and suffer through misogyny and oppression regardless of what happened, rather than about how they fought against it and overcame it (there were glimmers of this at the very end of the novel, but not throughout the novel). It was more a depressing look at what it meant to be a 1950s white housewife than anything else.  

That being said, I did root for the main character throughout the novel and really felt for her and everything she went through, especially while she was a child and teenager. Although I found myself waiting in vain for her to turn into a dragon and started caring less and less about her plight toward the end of the novel, I am afraid to say. Having her turn into a dragon would have really resonated with me more as a reader, as the story was being told from her point of view and I was eager to see what it was like to turn into a dragon from her point of view.  

Ultimately, I thought that this novel would have more dragons in it too, and that it would be mostly about dragons (or at least fully embody the metaphor dragons should represent for an emboldened and truly free woman, if you will), yet it kind of wasn’t. And this made sense at various points in the novel, as the issue with dragons was mainly that they were never talked about and that society and history wanted to ignore them and forget them or were trying to ignore them and forget them, and that they were literally being excluded from history in a multitude of ways. But I did have mixed feelings about this approach overall, as I oddly didn’t find myself identifying with or caring about what was happening with the dragons because they were still being treated as “other” by the author in a lot of ways from a distance as something to be skeptical about and feared.

I also wasn’t sure how I felt about Dr. Gantz being a male in the end either, as his records were an attempt at keeping the history of the dragons alive, both literally and figuratively. Which reminds me of the recurring themes of knots and memory throughout the novel that I did find compelling— how memories can tie you to versions of yourself, others, and the world that you like and don’t like, sometimes simultaneously. 

Here is a quote from the novel that I liked:

“Memory is a strange thing. It reorganizes and connects. It provides context and clarity; it reveals patterns and divergences. It finds the holes in the universe and stitches them closed, tying the threads together in a tight, unbreakable knot.” (p.362)

Overall, I would recommend this novel to those who enjoy a good coming-of-age story with a nicely tied-up, happy ending. 

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Today’s Writing Prompt