Marla is never spoken of again - not by Alex’s sick mother, and not by Alex’s father, who leaves her to raise Marla’s daughter Beatrice.īefore her transformation and vanishing, Marla told Alex that, “All women are magic. Alex’s aunt Marla was among those who rose up and transformed into a dragon, but it’s as if she never existed. 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”. So shares Alex, the narrator of this brilliant novel, who lives at a time when adults remember the “mass dragoning” of women that occurred on 25th April 1955, but never mention it. I was four years old when I first learned to be silent about dragons. “I was four years old when I first saw a dragon. Set from the 1950s, it presents a magnificent maelstrom of fire-breathing women who refuse to keep quiet, exposing the trauma of enforced silence, and shining a blazing light on how vital it is to transcend imposed shame and live your own way. Otherworldly, yet rooted in patriarchal realities, Kelly Barnhill‘s When Women Were Dragons is a storytelling masterwork.

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