Now with less Geraldine
When she was in nursery school, my daughter called me Geraldine. She would say “Ok, Geraldiiiiiiiine” when I told her it was time to clean up, take a bath, do chores, leave for school, come home, take medicine, and other unreasonable things.
Geraldine is the unfun part of me, the one in charge of things academic, rigorous, structured, and unwhimsical. She wants to be taken seriously and is one twitchy wrist away from saluting. Geraldine is the Assistant Vice President of Getting Stuff Done, Thank You. Geraldine is indispensable. One would not wish to tackle any sort of emergency without Geraldine nearby armed with a sharpened pencil. She is the keeper of outlines, the cataloger of margins. She is magnificent and exhausting. She is exactly who you want steering the ship through a storm and exactly who you do not want choosing the music afterward.
My point being that Geraldine has elbowed her way into more and more of these posts. Oh, sure, she lets Jackie come in all excited to tell you about what she’s reading and make occasional dumb jokes and do a lot of the heavy lifting. But Geraldine wants to make sure that the astute observation she had while reading makes it into the final draft. Geraldine has started interrupting my reading to administer pop quizzes on my own metacognition. “Are you reading in an Approved Literary Manner that can later be applied, however whimsically, to your posts?
I’m putting Geraldine on a reduced schedule. Mostly because I’m trying to add more mirth to my life, but also partly because I need to have fun reading the books and writing these posts. Otherwise I’ll end up resenting the writing, then the reading, and before you know it Geraldine and I will be on a performance improvement plan. I REFUSE.
I’m (re)turning this into more of a Book of the Month Club. Which is to say I’ll blarp about my new favorite book and then club you over the head with my enthusiasm.
The new format which I may or may not revisit depending on my hormones any given month:
- A full review of one book I can’t shut up about (possibly Very Smart, probably not).
- Honorable Mentions for other books I liked enough to finish.
- Tangents.
If this doesn’t work for you, please submit your complaint to management. Management is Geraldine.
Anyway, this month’s victim of my enthusiasm is…
When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill
Every woman has had at least one moment where she thought, “You know what? Now would be a great time to become an enormous fire-breathing creature.”
Usually it’s something small. An email. Someone asking where the ketchup is while standing directly in front of the ketchup. An interminable group text. DEFINITELY being told to smile.
We don’t have the luxury of actually becoming dragons. Most of us, anyway. Usually we sigh and maybe bitch a little in that group text, then we carry on participating in civilization.
Kelly Barnhill asked, “What if we didn’t?”
On April 25, 1955, in an alternate America, 642,987 women turned into dragons. And then no one talked about it.
Spectacle? YES! Subtle? NOT IN THE SLIGHTEST! Glorious? YES – GO TELL YOUR TEXT GROUP. I THINK THEY’RE STANDING IN FRONT OF AN OPEN FRIDGE.
Young Alex Green’s beloved aunt was one who dragoned. Alex’s family handled this in a way therapists would flag as “Whoa” by not talking about it. If everyone agrees something didn’t happen, did it, really? And how long can we repress it as a society? (see: Barnill’s mock research documents and Congressional testimonies).
Underneath all the scales and smoke, Barnhill writes about how societies pretend things didn’t happen. And if they did happen, CALM DOWN, LADIES.
Despite the title, this is a book about the impossible jobs women are routinely assigned. Be the mother. Be the sister. Be the shelter. Be the explanation. Be home. Be everything to everyone except yourself. Alex eventually learns that no one can be an entire village and surviving life is a group project. Those lessons, of course, come at a cost.
Yes, the dragons are obviously female rage, and they’re also grief. They are unrealized and directionless ambition. They’re the exhaustion of living as woman. And they are that awful and liberating moment when you realize you’ve spent years making yourself smaller so everyone else can stay comfortable. “Oh!” we say, “maybe it’s all this bending over backwards that makes my spine ache.”
One woman, in the middle of dragoning, offers perhaps the only necessary explanation for why the dragoning occurs:
“Everything is just too damn SMALL.”
If you’re hoping for a dragon-centered fantasy with detailed dragon lore and perhaps a helpful dragon appendix explaining dragoning and maybe some sort of cool hand-drawn old-timey dragon map this isn’t it. The dragons remain mysterious. They don’t explain themselves, and frankly, women shouldn’t have to, either
By the end of the novel, the dragons are still there, and we just care a whole lot more about the women they are. I hope the women in real life who have found everything too damned small find this book.
(P.S. I discovered When Women Were Dragons through Kari Bentley-Quinn’s wonderful Substack, The Long Climb. you can read that terrific post here Thank you, Kari!)
Honorable Mentions:
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
24 hours with six astronauts in the ISS. There is almost no plot and it is still one of the most most transporting novels I’ve read in years.
Read it if you enjoy books that blow your mind but also leave your resting pulse rate alone.
Joyful, Anyway by Kate Bowler
Living with suffering (aka “living”) and the refusal to pretend everything happens for a reason. Bowler selling joy-as-product or joy-as-reward. Thankfully.
Read it if you, too, believe joy is still worth noticing despite all evidence to the contrary.
Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart
A struggling family in a near-future America where technology, politics, and consumer culture all mesh. No matter how many gadgets we invent, people still find new and exciting ways to lie to themselves and each other.
Read if you like cultural satire which doesn’t forget that people are actually real and tender.
And there be the July reads. Read any good books lately?
Jackie Pick 