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 1950’s 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 … Thank you so much to Allen & Unwin for the opportunity to read this book. I love this book so much!Ĭontent warnings include mention of alcoholism, death of animals, domestic abuse, racism and sexual assault. I felt a kinship with the characters who dragoned and a fire inside that I fully expected to result in my own dragoning. I felt rage and helplessness alongside determination and hope and love. I fell in love with auntie Marla and Beatrice. It is joy that burns me now, and joy that makes my back ache for wings, and it is joy that makes me long to be more than myself. There’s rage in this book but there’s also joy. When I started this book I thought it was going to be about an alternate 1950’s, one where women got pissed off with the patriarchy and turned into dragons. It’s the power of women taking up space and refusing to be gaslit anymore.
It’s about how women diminish themselves to fit into the shape that society prescribes and the toxicity of secrets. Through dragoning, this book explores trauma and the silencing that often takes place in its aftermath. Through her eyes, we not only see how the Mass Dragoning changed society as a whole but also how it impacted upon Alex’s own family. She was still a child when the Mass Dragoning happened. Alex saw her first dragon when she was four. Perhaps this is how we learn silence – an absence of words, an absence of context, a hole in the universe where the truth should be. Don’t talk about what happened.įorget those who dragoned. But this new normal came at a cost.ĭragoning is unmentionable. So very wrong.įor those whose feet remained firmly on the ground on 25 April 1955, life went on.
You might believe that it was all over after the Mass Dragoning of 1955 but you’d be wrong. Marya Tilman’s transformation on 18 September 1898 was the “earliest scientifically confirmed case of spontaneous dragoning within the United States” but there were records of dragoning occurring centuries prior.
Sometimes, just sometimes, I’ll only make it to the third page before I buy the ebook so I can highlight passages to my heart’s content. Sometimes I only need to read the blurb to know for sure that a book is destined to become a favourite. Sometimes a cover image is enough to reel me in.
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