Hi, this is Sara Crow, owner of Crow & Co. Books in Hutchinson, Kansas, recommending one of my favorite books of the past year: When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill.
"I encourage you to consider a question: who benefits, my dear, when you force yourself to not feel angry?"
This question is one of the central ideas of this story. one of my favorite books to come out in the last year When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill. The book takes place in America in the 1950s-but not quite the America we know. In this version of the world, dragons exist. And those dragons are a dark secret that is not only taboo,' but is actively stifled at the highest levels of power. The dragons are women and are specifically women who are literally breaking their bounds. But, for the most part. the "dragonings" are isolated incidents. Until the Mass Dragoning of 1955.
In one day, women from across the country, from all walks of life, from homemakers to drag queens, begin to sprout wings and scales and talons and, before flying from the lives that kept them in boxes of starched cuffs, damask drapes, and pot roast promptly at 6:30 every night, burned away those things that hurt them the worst, and seemed to fly into oblivion.
Alex Green was left behind. Too young for dragoning, with a mother long gone (though not dead…just farther away than most anyone could be), her aunt flies off into the spring sky. And so, Alex is abandoned in the wake of all those wings—left in a world more wondrous and simultaneously more horrible than she could have previously imagined.
The monsters in this story aren't the dragons. They're the McCarthys and the deacons who enforce the order that made so many want to fly away in the first place.
"Perhaps this is how we learn silence," Alex Muses even before the dragoning, "an absence of words, an absence of context, a hole in the universe where the truth should be."
There are decisions before us when something transformative happens. We have the choice to live in a bitter denial of the possibility that transformative event represents. We can stifle or try to silence the change attempting to break free. We can approach the experience with openness, curiosity, and maybe even a little hope. Or we could try to forget it entirely-perhaps even forcefully.
"While it is true that there is a freedom in forgetting-and this country has made great use of that freedom-there is a tremendous power in remembrance."
This quote struck me like a twenty-foot wave. There are so many out there ardently trying to keep America a country that forgets. By banning books, by denying the reality of our history, by silencing the voices of those finally empowered to stand up and tell their own stories in their way, with their own context. They're trying to make us forget because hearing those voices could- and likely would-change everything they know and understand about the world. At the very least, if they can't control them, they want the dragons to go away and never come back.
In the absence of her aunt, Mrs. Gysinska, the local librarian, becomes the voice of hope and an anchor for Alex when the rest of the world abandons her. And for those of us who sometimes feel stifled, or hopeless, or abandoned, her words are as critical as a lifeboat on a sinking ship.
"And start keeping your eyes up. The skies are full of promise. You are less alone than you think."
There is always hope. There are always helpers. And I promise, you are always far less alone than you think.
