Her discoveries there are the stuff of romantic legend, catapulting her from scholarly obscurity to worldwide fame. This is one of the things genre does best.Even those who take no interest in the field of dragon naturalism have heard of Lady Trent’s expedition to the inhospitable deserts of Akhia. And I absolutely love that juxtaposition. It also wants to talk about, no shit, really, dragons. It has beautifully passionate things to say about gender and sexuality and culture. So as with Tooth and Claw before it, but using a completely different set of approaches to what segment of history and what kind of dragons we’re talking about, When Women Were Dragons keeps a firm, sure voice in its period. And there are trans women in this book, and some of them become dragons, and also some of them don’t. And you can tell that it’s not, because The Gays are right here in the book, and some of them become dragons and some do not. And the same for transgender issues: this is not an easy Dragoning = Transition book. There will be readers who want this book to be about sexuality–homosexuality, bisexuality–and it absolutely is, but not in an easy Dragons = The Gays way.

But also it’s about dragons with scales and shiny gold eyes, and the way that it manages its genre nature keeps its ground firm, means that it won’t get bogged down in one simple metaphor at the expense of other possibilities. When Women Were Dragons is about women’s intellect, women’s emotions, women’s freedoms, and the ways the America of the 1950s and early 1960s stifled all those things. One of my favorite things about genre books that embrace their own genre nature is that their metaphors can be multi-layered, because they embrace the concrete. Because Beatrice and Alex are each all the other one has–that and a fierce librarian, some half-trustworthy pamphlets, and their own determination. And Alex is fascinated, furious, torn, and her little cousin–now her sister–Beatrice–has a host of outsized emotions all her own that Alex has to help her manage. They have talons, they set buildings on fire, they tear down walls, no really, literal walls. No one wants to even acknowledge thinking about them, except for a few brave souls around the edges. In her proper small Catholic Wisconsin town, no one talks about dragons. Also, it isn’t, they really do turn into dragons.Īlex Green has one of the missing dragons-nee-women in her family, and the fallout shapes her entire life. Some of them just flew away, to the mountains, the sea, the great beyond. Thousands upon thousands of women turned into dragons at the same time: wings, fire-breathing, the whole lot. Throughout history, women have been able to turn into dragons, but in 1955, there was the Mass Dragoning.

When women were dragons review