SF/F Review – When Women Were Dragons
When Women Were Dragons, by Kelly Barnhill
Synopsis: A teen girl loses her mother to dragonism in a 1950s America where women (and sometimes drag queens) will occasionally explode at random (but usually in waves), killing everyone around them (or just one particular person they hate, or just doing a lot of property damage), and turn into dragons and fly away forever to live in a secret magic place… except jk lol not really
Book Review: This book is exactly why I had to write my “The Grasping Hands of Dead Worlds” essay. This is a perfect example of a dead world.
The author really really wanted to say something Important about the human condition. Barnhill wants to have a Profound Message that speaks truth. Unfortunately, Barnhill doesn’t actually have anything to say. She makes do with Pretending To Be Wise by observing that sexism sucks, and wouldn’t it be cool if you could purge anti-woman-sexism from the world by making people be terrified to be sexist against women?
Except that doesn’t really work, because if you want to keep the Mad Men-style setting and sexism going for the entire novel, but it’s discovered that all women are potential WMDs in the novel’s prologue, wouldn’t that drastically change the world in a way that precludes a Mad Men-style story?
This is solved by saying actually women have always had this power, but all humans just completely ignored this fact like one ignores a fart in an elevator. This could work if it was a 1984-esque dystopia the deforms every person within it via terror and violence. But it’s just standard 1950s America, where the worst the govt was willing to do was McCarthyism. So people behave re dragons as if they live in an brutal authoritarian panopticon, but have the emotions, experiences, and daily struggles of 1950s Americans.
As stated in the Dead Worlds essay, once there are no facts about how the world works that will change how anyone thinks or acts, no actions that can happen which will cause people to react in a way other than what’s most convenient to the author, you no longer have a world that has PEOPLE in it. You have empty marionettes, that ignore what is happening around them and repeat whatever lines and actions they were programmed with.
The amount of facepalming exasperation that single decision created would be enough to get me to stop reading this thing immediately if it wasn’t a book club book. But it was, so I soldiered on.
Here’s the thing… once you’ve decided that nothing in your world matters, why stop at just one ridiculous farce? Your world is already empty of people. Go nuts! And so Ms Barnhill does. The rules of the world change at the drop of a hat. Something will be stated in one chapter, and retconned the very next chapter. This is baffling, because this isn’t a serial work! Barnhill doesn’t have to explain something already published three years ago that’s inconvenient to what she wants to do… she could have simply gone back and edited the earlier chapter to keep the world coherent. But she chose not to.
After the fourth or fifth time this happened, I chose not to continue reading. This is a parody of storytelling. This feels like a performance art piece, where the author is trying to see just how much ridiculous abuse her audience will tolerate. This feels like watching candidate-Trump in 2016 doing everything he could to lose the primary, and being stymied by a populace that didn’t realize it was a publicity stunt.
I mean, I read Tinglers for this sort of thing, but they’re aware of what they’re doing and are really fun to read. This was like watching The Room. Not Recommended.
(not a) Book Club Review: This book club meeting happened in the brief window between my Burning Man and England trips. With all the time pressures and physical exhaustion, and the fact that this book was terrible, I didn’t go to the meeting. I was told later that everyone else thought it was terrible too. Not Recommended.