Review of When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill

I picked up this book because Cat Valente mentioned it in an interview. I admit the premise intrigued me. 

The style was easy to read but in my opinion, not innovative or eccentric enough for my liking. There is nothing wrong with a conventional style, but as I listened to the audiobook, I could not decide whether the tone was more suitable for YA or for adults. It seemed lodged between, dealing with heavy social contexts, too heavy for YA, and yet the language was straightforward, lacking description in some places, and not quite up to par with my current genre prose expectations.

But most readers will be intrigued by the central metaphor of women becoming dragons. How is society affected by this? How is the main character affected by the dragons in her life? Will she dragon? Will the mass dragoning become a total worldwide dragoning? Some of these questions are given partial answers. But similar to another book I read this year and only half enjoyed, called Babel, the world-building was too caught up in historical contexts to compel me. Also, there was not enough plot in this one. At least Babel had normal genre plot arcs. Unless you are going headfirst into literary experimentation, plot should be a framework for the metaphors. The underlying subtext is front and center here. And the inclusion of Communist red scare type scenarios felt out of place, with the kids practicing bomb drills and the old-fashioned ideologies dictating character reactions. People worried about how close kids are dancing at the school dance. That’s just so old-fashioned and quaint. The average six year old today is probably more morally corrupt than the adults in this novel. The women’s liberation in the book was nothing new, even with the inclusion of impressive mythical transformations. I probably would have been more impressed if more time was spent describing the dragons. But they were pretty absent from the narrative.

I was bothered by how some dragons were described as exploring the cosmos and the depths of the sea, while others felt constrained by societal restraints. Is that a consistency issue? As if after dragoning they still could not reach their full potential, or society tricked them into becoming some lesser versions of themselves. But they still were dragons. And yet the patriarchy somehow persisted unchecked? You could unpack a bunch of the suggestions in this novel and apply it to real world scenarios, but I was more hoping to get invested in the characters or the world. I was not. Unlike the work of Cat Valente, even in YA books like The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland, I am always transported by Valente’s magnificent imaginative language. Without that salacious texture to the prose, Barnhill’s daring and poignant premise fell flat. The meticulously related family and relationship problems that make up most of the novel’s conflict came off as vapid. And the out-of-perspective reportage filled in some world-building gaps, but seemed too on-the-nose, sometimes just plain silly. I did not think the humor landed either.

Overall, it was a very tepid reading experience. Perhaps if I read one of the author’s young adult novels, the voice and plot won’t feel so relegated to the wayside.