Wow. Just wow. This was everything I wanted it to be and more. An intricate knot of metaphors (though never heavy handed), feminist, angry, queer, and kind. Beautifully written and perfectly paced. I loved every minute of it.

I don't have a lot more to say review-wise yet (I do want to sit with it a bit more) except I would like to note that Barnhill avoids the gender essentialist trap that many of these kinds of novels end up falling into. She allows space for the existence of trans women in the mass dragoning - while they are not the focus, she also does not exclude them from the narrative. I appreciated that she wasn't exclusionary (even by omission) the way that other narratives have been. Excellent, thoughtful work, in my opinion.

4.5 stars

Wow - I powered through this one in a day. I admit that I was initially interested in this book because (1) it was about dragons, and (2) the premise reminded me of The Power. The Power is a book I actually think about a lot, despite reading it three years ago. And my main takeaway from this book is that I really want a whole bunch of people to read both The Power and When Women Were Dragons and then we all have a big major discussion about it comparing and contrasting the change and how society dealt with it, and what it means, and what we think would really happen if one of these scenarios occurred.

But this book on its own is really interesting. The first few chapters were a little slow, but I kept reading because I really wanted to get to some dragon-y parts. And then... my heart broke for Alex through most of it, in the ways that her family kept failing her as she grew up. And her father -- GARBAGE. I found myself wishing that she knew more about what was going on (and that someone would TALK about it), but I saw by the end that it was really effective storytelling that set us up so that we were learning about dragons and becoming more open=minded along with Alex. By the end, I was fully invested, and pleased by the beautiful ending. Definitely worth a read.

It starts off slow and kind of dense, but once the action begins, it's hard to resist the story as it drives forward. It reads as a true epic, one that makes you feel the world really has been reshaped as you read it. Would recommend.

"When Women Were Dragons exposes a world that wants to keep women small—their lives and their prospects—and examines what happens when they rise en masse and take up the space they deserve.". And I loved it.