đWhen Women Were Dragonsđ˛Review
Featuring hot takes from my friend Kayla Stansbury, writer
I love chatting about books, especially when someone I know is absolutely in love with a novel. There are few things as special as those moments when you connect with a book so much that you want everyone to read it, and I take a unique delight in seeing why people love the books they do.
I met the writer Kayla in the Tenacious Writing community where book coaches
and lead workshops, classes, study groups, and challenges every month. Since both Kayla and I have similar tastes in books, I had to ask:âWhatâs one of your favorite books that youâve read recently?â
What follows is a lightly edited transcription of the highlights of this book âWhen Women Were Dragonsâ by Kelly Barnhill.
Below, yours truly is going by the tag J.W., and Kayla Stansbury is âK.S.â
Love at First Sight
J.W.: What about the pitch of this book or how you heard about it first inspired you to read it, & why?
K.S.: I was in the Barnes & Noble, and I walked by the cover of this book, and IâŚsigh⌠(huge grin while holding up the book)
J.W. (laughing) Itâs such a great cover!
K.S.: I could talk about cover art all day. I walked past the cover and said, âWow, thatâs a cool cover.â
[đ¨Side note: The cover illustration was done by Charlotte Day, and the cover design was by Emily Mahon.]
K.S.: Then I knew Kelly Barnhill because she wrote âThe Girl Who Drank the Moon,â which is a childrenâs book that won a bunch of awards that I had heard of because it was so popular in the same genre that Iâm writing in. [Childrenâs books] I thought, âWow, I didnât know Kelly wrote books for adults.â And then I read the back, and it says:
âAlex Green lives in a world much like ours, except for a seminal event, the mass dragoning of 1955, when hundreds of thousands of women sprouted wings and talons and took to the skies.â
K.S.: And I was like, âOh, ok great! So Iâm reading this.â
The cover had stopped me in my tracks. And then that first sentence on the cover, pitched as an alternative history, like what if during the Red Scare in the United States with McCarthyism and all of that, what if it was dragons? And I thought âThatâs so wild and fun!â
That was it. After Iâd read that first sentence of the blurb I was like, âWell!â
J.W.: (Laughing) âThatâs it. Weâre done here.â
K.S.: Yeah. Now in the acknowledgments of the book, it talks about what gave the author the idea for this book. An editor asked her to do a story about dragons, considering her fantasy experience. It was meant to be just a silly little story, and it came about because a friend of hers was asking for material for a book they were working on. And then as she was working on that was also when Christine Ford gave her testimony at the Senate hearing about Cavanaughâs nomination for a Supreme Court judge position, so her feelings about that powerful testimony merged with the story she was doing about dragons. This book was her personal response to that event that was happening and affecting everyone.
***
âď¸Â Side note for anyone who doesnât know: What prompted her to write this tale was an allegation of historical sexual assault by the professor of psychology, Christine Blasey Ford, against the judge Brett Kavanaugh, who would later become an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.
In the acknowledgments, Kelly says:
âI, along with the rest of America listened with horror and incandescent fury to the brave, stalwart testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, as she begged the Senate to reconsider their Supreme Court Justice nominee and make a different choice, and I decided to write a story about rage. And dragons. But mostly about rageâŚ
Stories are funny things thoughâŚthis story quickly informed me that it wanted to be a novel... I thought I was writing a story about rage, but there is also more than that. This is a story about memory, trauma, and moreâŚâ
***
J.W.: Yes. Now about those origins, did knowing the background of what inspired the book change the way you felt about the book?
K.S.: I think that when we see rageâŚif we start interrogating that feeling even deeperâŚwhat is the thing that is grating on the soul that is creating that rage?
There are other things in my life that grated on my soul. As a teacher, Iâd had a situation in my classroom where the ceiling had caved in, and it had been very difficult to try and get that fixed. Later I asked a man on the school board at a public meeting about the lack of maintenance funding for the building because funds were going to other places. After I described the problems, this man stood up and told me:
âWell, if that had happened, then I would have heard about it.â
How absurd is it? Everyone at the school knew that what I was saying was true. Everyone could feel the ridiculousness of his statement.
Similarly, for Alex in the book to be told that, âYou have never had an aunt. Your cousin is actually your sister.â It feels ridiculous, but the fact that itâs not true isnât enough to make it stop.
Thatâs the Magical Realism aspect of it. You use a thing â that even though it may be ridiculous â itâs a reflection of what reality feels like.
Overall, in the book, Kelly Barnhill mainly brings up ways that information is suppressed and discredited in similar ways.
J.W.: That is really powerful. I can totally understand how it all ties together under that concept. Now what did you think you were getting into when you started reading it?
K.S.: The thing that surprised me is that, in terms of genre, it does read like a memoir, and it isnât structured like a traditional novel or fantasy. It doesnât follow those beats. It is a character-structured story. But thatâs the thing I love most about it, how much it does read like a real memoir. When I first started reading it though, I didnât know anything about it. I went into it with a very open-ended perspective, so there wasnât a sense of any real set of âexpectations.â
J.W.: Now for those who havenât read the book, letâs talk about the premise of the book:
Weâre in 1955.
Some women, but not all, are (spontaneously?) turning into dragons & no one knew why.
The event has already happened & thereâs a level of indoctrination of society's refusal to admit dragons exist.
This girl is confused about what happened & trying to figure it out.
What would you add to clarify what the main conflict of the story overall is?
K.S.: For a lot of the beginning of the book, Alex doesnât come into it trying to figure out what happened. Itâs more about her trying to find her place in the world where there are these big gaps of information and gaps in her memory. Sheâs doing the best that she can, but she has no context for it. Itâs less about Alex trying to understand what happened in the mass dragoning and more about her trying to build a life for herself when she doesnât have all of the information, and when these lines of communication are broken between the women in her family. Because that information has been withheld from her, she doesnât have the language to talk about things, so sheâs stunted in a lot of ways.
Towards the end of the book, Alex listens to someone saying that these people were âin love,â and though sheâs about 21 or 22 at that time, it has not even occurred to her that she never recognized what being in love was until then. And she still hasnât come to terms with what happened between her and Sonia when they were young because thatâs a stunted growth thing, psychologically. No one has ever used those words to explain whatâs going on, so she didnât have the words to explain what was happening to herself, so she didnât know herself. Iâd say thatâs a lot of what this book is about, that this older woman is reflecting on the seminal event, âThe Mass Dragoningâ of 1955, that was such a pivotal point in her life, and the way that people suppressing information about it affected her development.
J.W.: Well said. I agree that when people go through trauma, they can have these sort of âclosed doorsâ where things are locked away, and you donât have access to those memories, just to cope with the world.
K.S.: Yes. Absolutely.
J.W.: Now tell me, what was your favorite part of the book and why?
K.S.: I loved the in-world articles and testimonials to Congress. Itâs like how Neal Shusterman wrote this YA series called âUnwindâ⌠(pictured below)
and in that book, he begins each chapter with an in-world news article. He talks about how he shot himself in the foot though because he then had to keep going up with them for each following chapter. đ
But Kelly does this sort of thing also, and I loved how rich the world building was, and the way she takes real historical events and kind of puts a âDragoningâ spin on them. For example, on page 19, she talks about the first recorded instance of âDragoningâ that was uncovered at the Palace of Nestor, and thatâs a real archeological dig. (Pictured below, a site more than 2,000 years old in Greece.)
All of these real-world artifacts, sheâs thinking about through this âDragoningâ lens. So for all these world events, sheâs looking at them as if âThe Mass Dragoningâ is something that has happened before and has been actively suppressed. It makes the world feel so rich.
She does this thing I love so much in alternative history novels where itâs like thereâs this tiny chance that maybe it actually did happen and could be real but we donât know about it. đ Thatâs my favorite thing about the book.
J.W.: That reminds me of the show âOnce Upon a Time,â [where there is an alternate reality in which fairy tales actually happened, but the characters got trapped in our âmodernâ world] which I loved, at least for the first 3 seasonsâŚuntil all the weird Disney tie-ins from other universesâŚ
K.S.: Yes! We donât talk about what happened after season 3.
J.W.: Exactly. đSeason 3 was so good. I was âHooked.â
(Shameless insertion of fan art below)âŹď¸
K.S.: Season 3 was a masterpiece.
J.W.: đ¤Ł
Now coming back to this book, what did this novel âWhen Women Were Dragons?â do differently for you (i.e. What technique or thing did it do very well to make it a compelling story?)
K.S.: It does this thing where a lot of sections are more like prose poetry.
She does this other thing throughout the book. When Alex is reminiscing about her childhood, anytime she stumbles upon memories of her Aunt and Beatrice and all this, sheâll say things like on page 54:
âBefore Beatrice was my sister⌠(What am I saying? Beatrice has always been my sister. Sheâs never not been my sister. You see? Itâs so easy to lie. At times, itâs difficult to stop.)â
That motif comes back in a way that feels more poetic than typical prose.
Because she focuses so much on the way her mother is always making these Celtic knots of protection in the beginning of the book, Alex keeps using the word âknotâ to describe her feelings, and itâs like sheâs created her own world of meaning around that term. By the time we get to the end of the book, this word âknottedâ has taken on so many other layers of meaning, like a poetic technique. Especially in poems where you have this turn at the end, so that in the beginning, a poem like this would take a specific image, and then build it up, until at the end you flip it or turn it into something else, all of these elements are like poetic strategies. Eventually, am Iâm reading her writing, it feels more like reading a poem. That all makes it feel deeply personal, much like a real memoir would sound like.
Another book that does this kind of technique so well and changed my life wasâŚhere⌠[pulls another book off of the shelf]
This book was part of my assigned reading in a Young Adult fiction class in college, and it was so good that when I started reading it, I had to stop, and I physically got up and walked over to my professorâs office because I had to tell him how much I felt this book was SO good! I had to physically move because I felt âSomeone else just has to know just how good this book is!â (Even though I know that this man already knows because he assigned it đ)
[Kayla holds up the book] Itâs âAristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe.â
J.W.: Oh yes, thatâs on my TBR list.
K.S.: The author Benjamin was a poet before he wrote this novel, so a lot of it feels like long-form poetry. I have so many places where Iâve circled things and marked all over the pages of this book.
And you know, when I went my professorâs office to tell him, he wasnât even there at the time. I was so bereft. Like what am I supposed to do with all these feelings now? đ
J.W.: đ Well now, I have to read it.
K.S.: Yes, the language in âWhen Women Were Dragonsâ reminded me so much of what I felt the first time I read âAristotle and Dante.â
J.W.: I love that.
Now, Iâm also dying to ask you, is there a scene where we get to see a woman transform into a dragon, or is it more like a referenced background event?
K.S.: Oh yes, yes, yes! It is important to note that a lot of the major background players in the book are academics and scientists, and so the whole process [of turning into dragons] is portrayed in much less of a fantastical way but in more of a biological process. Doctor Gantz and all these researchers have been studying it underground because all of this information was so repressed by the âCongress Committee Against Un-American Activities.â You get both really emotional descriptions of dragoning, but because there are so many scientist characters, you get a very detailed description of the exact biological process itself as they are studying it.
Throughout the novel, the dragons become characters that Alex directly interacts with.
J.W.: Where did the dragons go? Or is that something left as an unsolved mystery?
K.S.: I donât want to spoil the book, but you do find out where they go. A big part of the special experience of reading this book was that youâre finding out the truth about the dragons at the same time that the main character Alex is discovering it.
J.W.: Cool. Weâll leave it at that.
Now thereâs been a lot of debate in the reviews of this book about why the women turned into dragons and what that represents. Do you think the turning into dragons thing (since itâs magical realism) was more of a metaphor for women rebelling against injustices & inequalities in their lives, or was it just âleaving the systemâ for good?
K.S.: Itâs a yes, ANDâŚ!
There are a lot of different reasons âwhy women dragonedâ presented by the novel itself through different characters. As Alex gets closer to the truth, you see that itâs never fully defined. Itâs a scientific exploration of this phenomenon where not all the information is complete because it was suppressed. Part of the bookâs message is that as a society, we canât both have concrete explanations of âwhyâ and suppress the information, not being allowed to ask questions. You canât have both. Because Alex wasnât allowed to ask questions as a young person, then you see more of others projecting their ideas of why they think the dragoning happened. Then as Alex talks to people before they âdragon,â you get more insights about how many different reasons they had to âdragon.â You cannot apply one singular reason to all the thousands of them because they are all such individually different people. The desire to have a simple explanation that helps people âmove onâ from the thing is strong, like people want a reason so that they put it away and then wonât have to talk about it anymore.
J.W.: Because they have a desire to control it.
K.S.: Yeah. And thatâs a false impulse. Thatâs not why people should be asking this question. If youâre waiting around for an answer thatâs going to allow you to control whatâs happening, then youâre always going to have the wrong answer.
J.W.: I love that! Now is there anything else you wanted to add about this book?
K.S.: I donât read memoir, so I would be interested to see what other people who read a lot of memoirs think of the structure of this book. I enjoyed this book in many ways more since I donât know the typical standards and practices of writing a memoir. I couldnât âsee the rebarâ behind the construction of it, you know? So it was very immersive for me.
J.W.: Yes! I have observed from the memoirs Iâve read that the perspectives of a life can be radically different depending on whoâs telling it, and there are so many different structures. It reminds me so much of another woman from history in the early 1900s who completely rebelled against the system she grew up in, for she was in a poor farming area of Ireland, and she was called Chicago May. She hated that her whole life was raising her younger brothers and sisters and working constantly (in a time when there was no birth control, so families were quite large). Resentments grew so much that she wrote in a diary, âItâs not my fault I was born.â So she stole a bunch of money from her family and ran away to America on a steamship, and later became a notorious thief. [See the book review I did on that
K.S.: đ She wouldâve been a great dragon.
J.W.: And the people in Ireland that the biographer interviewed who knew her didnât really want to talk about her. Some said, âTheyâd pray for her,â and that was pretty much it. That reminds me of the âDragoningâ â like if a woman rebels drastically, people want to pretend it never happened and donât talk about it.
J.W.: Kayla, thank you so much for this interview. This has been great, and I had so much fun!
If anyone wants to find you, follow you, or see glimpses of your writing projects, then where should they go?
K.S.: I'm @kaylastansbury on TikTok where I've been old school vlogging my way through the second draft of my YA Horror manuscript, Don't Wish Me Luck. For all of my previously published pieces, check out www.linktr.ee/knstansbury!
P.S. If youâd like to join in on my personal journey of revising a gothic historical novel, or just hear my rants as I bust popular writing myths, then please check out: