She also knows that Beatrice’s mom Marla dragoned and fears that Beatrice may dragon as well. She is painfully aware that her father’s support will end as soon as she graduates. Contact with their father is limited to financial support and occasional phone calls.Īlex navigates high school while playing mother to a younger sister to whom she is steadfastly devoted. Alex and Beatrice are relocated to an apartment of their own. Alex and Beatrice’s mother is immediately replaced by their father’s notably pregnant former secretary. Whereupon their father suddenly reveals that he is in fact far worse than he seemed to be. Having lost her aunt to dragoning, a by-now teenaged Alex and young Beatrice lose their mother to cancer. Refusing to acknowledge cancer will not cure it. Alex is aware her mother is unwell but has no idea what’s wrong. Alex’s infatuation with a fellow schoolgirl is also ruthlessly discouraged.Ĭancer is a word as unspeakable in the 1950s as dragoning. She will just become a housewife after all. Her intellectual talents, which are arguably as great as her mother’s, are not encouraged.

As far as the Greens were concerned, Marla had never existed.Īlex is being raised to conform. her parents firmly insisted that Beatrice had always been part of the family. Since dragooning was not to be mentioned. Marla vanished on April 25 th (as did her husband for related but quite different reasons). She was pressured into a marriage but it did not turn out well her husband was a hapless loser whose sole positive contribution to the household was fathering Marla’s daughter Beatrice. The only discordant note in this relentlessly conventional household was the influence of Alex’s aunt Marla, who was a talented auto mechanic. After all, of what possible use were intellectual and professional achievements to the women of 1950s America? Her father was a banker, her mother, whose mathematical genius had been suppressed to better fit the role of homemaker, a housewife. Prior to April 25, Alex’s life was a fairly conventional one for a young American girl. Those reluctant to follow this convention were targeted as un-American and blacklisted.Īlex (not the Alexandra adults around her insist on calling her) Green was too young to dragon, but her life would be transformed by the event. Mass dragoning could not be ignored … but it did not take Cold War America very long to collectively agree that dragoning (mass or otherwise, causes, and whether or not dragoning was a one-off or an ongoing phenomenon) were all subjects unfit for polite conversation. The new dragons abandoned their homes for destinations that better suited them. On April 25, 1955, 642, 987 American women spontaneously became dragons. Kelly Barnhill’s 2022 When Women Were Dragons is a modern fantasy set in the 1950s.

When women were dragons review