When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill
This fantasy is mostly a coming-of-age story with a bit of historical fiction and speculative fiction / alternate history. I'm not much into dragons and fantasy, but this book grabbed me with the first two paragraphs in chapter 1:
I was four years old when I first met a dragon. I never told my mother. I didn't think she'd understand.(I was wrong, obviously. But I was wrong about a lot of things when it came to her. This is not particularly unusual. I think, perhaps, none of us ever know our mothers, not really. Or at least until it's too late.)
The protagonist is Alex[andra] Green, growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. It's 1951 when the book begins, so Alex is about ten years older than me, but I could still relate to many of the things she (and especially her younger cousin/"sister" Beatrice. who is only about two years older than me) experience in those eras.
Alex is eight when the first “Mass Dragoning” occurs in 1955, with thousands of women in the United States suddenly turning into dragons - including Alex's aunt, who took care of her while her mother was ill. But as the opening paragraph indicates, dragons had been around prior to that. It's just that no one talked about it, and the government tried to cover it up.
In an interview, author Kelly Barnhill said
I began this book during a critical time in American history, as the United States Senate – along with the rest of us – listened, riveted, to the testimony of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, as she recounted the sexual assault that she experienced, perpetrated by a man [Brett Kavanaugh] who was about to be confirmed to the Supreme Court. She shared her story as an act of bravery, in an attempt to stop her country from making a terrible mistake, putting the fate of millions of women – our autonomy, our privacy, our capacity to make our own medical decisions – in the hands of the man who harmed her. In the end, her testimony failed. He was confirmed and all of our fears were realized. As I listened to her, realizing that the die was set and knowing with grim certainty how the next few years would play out, I found myself nearly exploding with rage – for myself, for my children, for my nieces, for the next generation that would grow up with less freedom than I had. I decided then and there that I would write a book about women turning into dragons, and that’s exactly what I did.
This was a good book to read after Lessons in Chemistry, also set in the 1960s, as it had similar themes about the treatment of women in that era. As with Elizabeth Zott in that book, I grew to really care about Alex Green in this book. Her characterization is the strength of the book.
A few quotes that stuck with me, because they are timely:
From chapter 9, page 56:
"But it is difficult for any propagandic apparatus, no matter how advanced, to counteract the force of millions of eyewitnesses."
From chapter 33, page 255:
"The beautiful thing about science is that we do not know what we cannot know and we will not know until we know."
From chapter 44, page 334:
"In any successful marriage, one partner must face the reality of being very old, and very alone. What is grief, but love that's lost its object?"
The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon
I read this book partly because Reading Group Guides said it was (one of) the most discussed books in 2023.
This historical fiction novel opens with a mystery. A body is found frozen in the Kennebec River near Hallowell, Maine, in November 1789. Martha Ballard, one of the local midwives, is summoned to examine the body and determine cause of death. The body is one of two men named by the wife of a local minister as her rapists. Martha determines it's a murder, but a new (male) doctor in town claims it was an accident, and the local judge - the other accused rapist - concurs. So over the winter, through the next six months, Martha investigates the murder on her own, with the complications of friends and family being suspects (at least for her) at various times.
The mystery part moves slowly, but that's because the book is mostly historical fiction based on the real Martha Ballard, who kept a diary for 27 years, starting the year she turned fifty (1785) right up until her death in 1812. Diary entries play a big part in this story, but there are flashbacks to events earlier in Martha's life. The day-to-day life in post-Revolutionary New England, especially for women, is the most interesting part of this book.
In the author's note at the end, author Ariel Lawhon is careful to tell the reader what's true and what's fiction. A major source for Lawhon was the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, published in 1990. I was able to read this later this month.
There is an online version of Martha's handwritten diary (microfilmed original images), and there was also a PBS docudrama on it (based on Ulrich's book and also called A Midwife’s Tale) in 1997, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger
I read this book because Reading Group Guides said it was (one of) the most discussed books in 2019. It was .... okay.
Two white orphaned white boys are placed at a boarding school for Native American children in Minnesota in 1932. The younger orphan, Odie (the narrator, who I found a bit annoying) is always getting into trouble Things finally reach a point where he needs to run away - along with his older brother Albert, an orphaned Native American called Mose, and Emmy, the orphaned daughter of a teacher who lost her life in a recent tornado, who is "adopted" by the cruel superintendent of the school. The children escape in Emmy's family's canoe, traveling down the Gilead River on their way to the Mississippi and St. Louis, where Odie and Albert have an aunt.
Of course there are adventures and misadventures along the way, as well as a lot of luck. In his acknowledgments, author William Kent Krueger states that the book was "envisioned as an update of Huckleberry Finn," with "the Great Depression ... as the perfect, challenging setting." Charles Dickens and Homer were inspirations too - Odie is short for Odysseus. There's a lot for book clubs to discuss in this novel.
The Shy Mouse's Wish by Wendy Camarillo
I received a copy of this book to review thanks to the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. There, author and illustrator Wendy Camarillo wrote, "Looking forward to your honest reviews on LibraryThing. I am a new author and this would really help me." So here goes.
This picture book tells the story of a lonely mouse who wants friends, but needs to be encouraged to leave her den to find them. The illustrations of the mouse and little animals she meets, particularly the hedgehog, bug, frog, and fox, are lovely - especially the eyes. However, the font used for the text, which is written in all capital letters, is difficult to read, making this book more appropriate as a parent or teacher read-aloud than for young children to read themselves.
A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
This book won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for History. I read it because it was a major source for Ariel Lawhon's The Frozen River, as Martha Ballard was the main character in that novel.
Martha Ballard kept a diary for 27 years, starting the year she turned fifty (1785) right up until her death in 1812. She was a midwife and traditional medicine practitioner in the Kennebec River towns of Hallowell and Augusta in Maine (then a part of Massachusetts), and in those years, attended 814 births. But Martha's diary also documents other aspects of her life - raising six children to adulthood, managing a family weaving business, as well as all the endless household tasks of that era.
This well-researched book is interspersed with maps, illustrations, tables and graphs. There is a twelve-page appendix of medicinal ingredients mentioned in Ballard's diary. There are also 47 pages of endnotes citing sources, four pages of acknowledgements, and a 28-page index.
A 32-page introduction provides background about Martha, her origins and family, the time and place, and her diary. The shorter (seven pages) epilogue tells what happened to the diary after Martha's death, and discusses two of her famous relatives, great-great-granddaughter Mary Hobart (a physician who donated the diary to the Maine State Library) and nurse Clara Barton, her great niece.
In the ten chapters between, author Laurel Thatcher Ulrich takes diary entries from a roughly one month period in different years between 1787 and 1809 as the starting point for chapters on different subjects, incorporating her vast research.
Ballard's midwifery and healing practices as well as medicine in this era are the focus of three chapters. Two chapters focus on major events in the area, a rape trial (October 1789) and a mass murder (April 1806). Others focus on family affairs, (with associated commentary on the era):
- the weaving business Martha and her daughters operate (the female economy),
- three family marriages in 1792 (marriage customs and laws on fornication - I found it interesting that 29% of the women whose babies Martha delivered were pregnant before marriage, and 2.4% of the deliveries were to single women),
- a difficult year, 1796 (her husband Ephraim's surveying work),
- more difficulties in 1804 when Ephraim is in jail for debt (laws and prison), and
- gardening and Martha's last years.
This book was incredibly interesting. I learned a lot about life in New England in the early Federal period (post Revolutionary War, pre-War of 1812), especially for women, who are so underrepresented in our history.
