Women decide they have had enough of this life, so they turn into dragons and take off, frequently (but not always) burning up their house with their husband in it before flying off.
I had never read anything by Kelly Barnhill before, although I had heard a lot of good things about The Girl Who Drank the Moon, which is also by Barnhill.
I was having brunch with some friends when one of them started raving about this author, and this book in particular, and so I had to read it.
It’s so good!
The book is set in the 1950s and early ’60s mostly told from the third-person limited perspective of Alexandra, starting when she’s very young. She prefers to be called Alex, but both her parents insist on calling her Alexandra. Only her Aunt Marla calls her Alex.
Marla wears pants and works as an auto mechanic, and a really good one at that.
Alex’s mom was a math whiz, and even went to college to study mathematics before getting a job in a bank, where she met Alex’s dad and ended up going the whole marriage-and-kids route. Now she doesn’t even want to talk about her history in mathematics, and her husband certainly doesn’t want any talk of women going to college because what are they going to do with that degree when they’re cooking and cleaning for their husbands and children?
Marla clearly loves her sister very much, but her sister just seems to be aggravated by her, and ends up pushing her away. At one point she says Marla should leave until she gets her own husband, so Marla goes out and gets herself a useless drunk of a husband, and even has a kid with him. Only then is she allowed back into her sister’s life.
Alex falls in love with her cousin, Beatrice, right away.
Then there’s the Mass Dragoning of 1955.
Hundreds of thousands of women across the country spontaneously turn into dragons and fly off. Some of them choose to live in the mountains, others in the oceans, and still others in outer space. I find it hard to suspend my disbelief enough to get to a point where dragons don’t need to breathe, but as long as we’re in a world where dragons exist, I might as well.
As catastrophic as it was for so many people all across the country to lose wives, mothers, aunts, and sisters (only adult women “dragoned”) no one wants to talk about it. It’s considered a “female thing,” and therefore not fit to be discussed.
One of the women who spontaneously dragons (and whose husband is never seen again) is Marla. When Alex’s mom gets the news, she disappears, and comes back with Beatrice. She then makes up a room for Beatrice and informs Alex that Beatrice is her sister. She has always been her sister. There has never been an Aunt Marla.
Beatrice is only about a year old at this point, so she grows up only being told this lie and never knowing she had another mother.
When Alex is in high school, her mom gets cancer and dies. Her dad, who was always sleeping around, not only brings home his already-pregnant secretary, but goes an awful step further in kicking Alex and Beatrice out of the house. He sets them up in a tiny apartment, for which he pays the rent. He also pays the groceries and gives them a little bit of spending money, but that’s it. Alex now has to raise Beatrice on her own and get through school. Her father calls once on Sundays to keep up the pretense that he gives a shit, but even that falls by the wayside after a few years.
Like her mom, Alex is a math whiz and whip smart. While raising her sister and keeping house for the both of them, not only does she stay in high school, she starts taking college courses via correspondence. She’s determined to go to college, but her dad doesn’t want to hear about it, instead offering to get her a job as a typist before she’s even graduated high school.
She doesn’t know how she’ll figure it out, but she’s determined.
In the nick of time, her Aunt Marla reappears, still in dragon form. She’s not the only dragon to come back, either. Other dragons start showing up and integrating themselves back into society, whether society wants them there or not.
As with all change, there are people who welcome this new reality, and people who try to deny it out of fear.
Interspersed between the chapters are excerpts of a scientist’s testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. These excerpts talk about what happened during The Mass Dragoning of 1955, but it also talks about mentions of dragoning throughout history. That means this is not an isolated incident. Merely the largest known incident of so many women spontaneously dragoning all at once.
I was trying to figure out why Barnhill would have had the Mass Dragoning take place in 1955. What was it about that year that made it ripe for hundreds of thousands of women to all decide, on their own, that it was time to leave this life behind and go on an adventure of their own?
When I saw the excerpts of the testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, it clicked. The “Red Scare” was running rampant across the U.S. and a lot of conservatives took advantage of that fear to try to stress the importance of maintaining the status quo.
Kinda hard to do that when half your adult population has a tendency to change form and take off.
When I was first told about this book, I was told it was about women using their anger to turn into dragons, and that certainly happens, and there is a lot of anger in this book. Alex is angry at her aunt for abandoning them. Angry at her mom for dying. Angry at her dad for abandoning her and forcing her into adulthood and semi-parenthood when she’s still a child herself.
But it’s not always about anger. There’s also a lot of joy in this book.
One woman starts to transform into a dragon while she’s flying a plane. Through the radio, she tells someone back on the ground how beautiful it is up there, and the fact that she can’t bring herself to go back down. So she ejects herself from the plane, dragons (I have to love a book that turns “dragon” into a verb), then grabs the plane and drops it back off on the tarmac before flying off.
Beatrice knows from an early age that she’s a dragon and she can’t wait to fully transform.
Another thing I love about this book is that, because Alex is raising Beatrice, she allows Beatrice to fully be herself. She uses a wooden sword to get into swordfights with other kids in the neighborhood. She’s loud, she’s always a mess, and her hair is constantly coming undone. When most parents of the era (certainly Alex’s parents) would have tried to eliminate such “unladylike” qualities from Beatrice, Alex lets her be, and I love that for both of them.
I love this book so much! I got a copy from the library, but I might need to buy my own copy because it’s just that good.