Instead, the novel unfolds, rather surprisingly and wonder­fully, as an almost Dickensian personal history; the subtitle of the first-person narrative-within-the-novel is ‘‘Being the Truthful Accounting of the Life of Alex Green – Physicist, Professor, Activist. In the 1950s Alexandra "Alex" Green, the only child of an absentee father and a stern housewife mother, grows up under the influence of her beloved aunt Marla. When the protagonist Jane’s husband and son disappear from their camping vacation, she seeks out Evangelyne — her charismatic ex who now heads the country’s Commensalist Party (ComPA). Society turning in on itself, a mother more protective than ever; the upsetting and confusing insistence that Marla never even existed and watching her beloved Beatrice becoming dangerously obsessed with the forbidden. Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working.

The Newbery Medal-winning children’s author dedicates her first novel for adult readers to Christine Blasey Ford, whose testimony at the confirmation hearings of Justice Brett Kavanaugh unleashed the rage of many women.As women around the world inexplicably transform into dragons, a young girl struggles to take care of her cousin in 1950s America. Before she died, Alex’s mother worked with the mathematics of knots, writing “calculations and algebraic expressions that defined the ways in which each wobble, loop, twist and elbow intersected, interplayed. I know about using knots in spell casting and magic, and as they appear throughout the story - they have history, and lore, - and I would have loved for them to be more fully explained, but I can’t say much without spoiling it. At family gatherings, Marla frequently discusses her sister’s many talents—namely that Bertha was an excellent mathematician who excelled in her classes and graduated college, a feat made possible only because Marla worked to put her sister through school after their parents died. That, and transcripts from a hearing by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, allows the book to play with the balance between the narrow lens on Alex, which is the emotional heart of the story, and the broader worldbuilding, which is rich and horrifying and empathetic.

The beautiful thing about science is that we do not know what we cannot know and we will not know until we know. The novel states that an unexplained force “had removed every human with a Y chromosome, everyone who’d ever been potentially capable of producing sperm. The pacing can seem a little slow in the start, but throughout it worked well, adding in to Alex’s narrative, historical accounts, newspaper articles and snippets from the wonderful Dr.True to the genre, Barnhill creates a world in which dragons exist and builds a sober, authentic tone by crafting seemingly historical documents to introduce the narrative, the most dominant of which is a memoir written from the perspective of protagonist Alex Green. Gantz and relying upon his expertise, she suggests to her family that Beatrice should transform into a dragon despite her young age, for it is something she was born to do. The image begins to rapidly darken and lighten: “We see the shadows of the men and animals turning, lengthening and shortening. Green because he thinks education is useless for a woman, Bertha Green because she is a wife and a mother first, and Alex because she doesn’t understand the significance. 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.