this is a book about how hard it was to be a post-war white housewife and it fails to tread any ground left vacant by the stepford wives (doing, frankly, even less than that seminal novel), making it essentially redundant reading in 2022, when feminism, even and maybe especially righteous feminist fury, is concerned with more complex matters. Not completely unreadable, but the magical realism and lyrical tone are undermined by the second-wave-feminist unexamined, uncomplex, unintersectional tone.

Everything is about to change, forever.Īnd when it does, this, too, will be unmentionable. Whether anyone likes it or not, the Mass Dragoning is coming. But she is a ghostly shadow of her former self, and with scars across her body - wide, deep burns, as though she had been attacked by a monster who breathed fire.Īlex, growing from young girl to fiercely independent teenager, is desperate for answers, but doesn't get any. Then Alex's mother disappears, and reappears a week later, one quiet Tuesday, with no explanation whatsoever as to where she has been.

In her next-door neighbour's garden, in the spot where the old lady usually sits, is a huge dragon, an astonished expression on its face before it opens its wings and soars away across the rooftops.Īnd Alex doesn't see the little old lady after that.

In this timely and timeless speculative novel, set in 1950s America, Kelly Barnhill exposes a world that wants to keep girls and women small - and examines what happens when they rise up.Īlex Green is four years old when she first sees a dragon. In a world where girls and women are taught to be quiet, the dragons inside them are about to be set free.

Kelly barnhill when women were dragons