When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill (audio)

Posted on December 15, 2025 by pagesofjulia

I don’t recall where I got this title from, but I loved this book, and am grateful to whatever review or list sent it my way. Also to my lovely partner who gifted it to me for the long drive from Texas to West Virginia.

When Women Were Dragons: Being the Truthful Accounting of the Life of Alex Green–Physicist, Professor, Activist. Still Human. A memoir, of sorts is a living, breathing tale, ever expanding, filled with metaphor that reshapes itself with the reader’s interpretation. It opens with a strange letter from a Nebraska housewife in 1898 to her mother, shortly before the woman spontaneously dragoned. Next we have an excerpt from the opening statement given by Dr. Henry Gantz to the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1957. Then we get into the first-person narration of Alex Green, who will tell most of this story, with brief insertions mostly from Dr. Gantz’s work – bit of an epistolary format. (The audiobook is narrated by Kimberly Farr, as Alex Green, and Mark Bramhall, as Dr. Gantz, which I thought was a great choice.) “I was four years old when I first met a dragon. I didn’t tell my mother. I didn’t think she’d understand.”

I think this must be right around 1950. Alex grows up in small-town Wisconsin, in a pretty 1950s world: there are many things we just don’t talk about, including cancer, menstruation and most aspects of girlhood and womanhood, what to expect on one’s wedding night, diversity in sexual orientation and gender expression, our feelings, and dragons. When Alex is a little girl, her mother goes away for some time – months – and no one explains or even acknowledges the change; likewise when her mother returns, gaunt, weak, different (she doesn’t even smell right). The reader understands better than little-girl Alex when her mother’s chest is glimpsed, missing breasts, two scars like smiles. This world is recognizably our own except for the dragons. Women in this world can dragon (that’s a verb), or become dragons, at which point they sometimes eat their husbands (this seems to happen frequently with very unlikeable, not to say abusive, husbands) before flying away. Dragoning is a poorly understood phenomenon because, as with much that is female or feminine, society judges it too shameful to examine, and science mostly averts its gaze. Dr. Gantz is a rare exception: he believes in the scientific mandate to learn, whatever truths are revealed. Biology should never be shameful. His research articles and responses to an oppressive world are useful seasonings to this story, and he is himself a delightful character, alongside the heroic librarian Mrs. Gyzinska.

And oh, Alex’s auntie Marla, a wonderful woman who comes and cares for her while her mother is away in cancer treatment, a big powerful woman who flies airplanes during the war and works as a car mechanic and wears men’s clothes and takes very little shit, and who we lose to the Mass Dragoning of 1955. When Marla dragons, she leaves behind an infant daughter, Alex’s cousin Beatrice, who from here on is raised as Alex’s sister. Such is the gaslighting of Alex’s family and world that she learns to really believe – almost – that she has no aunt, that Beatrice has always been her sister. (Echoes of 1984. We have always been at war with Eastasia.) And boy, the time Alex has raising her younger sister, Beatrice, a delightful dragon of a child if there ever was one.

Despite all I’ve just thrown at you, I’ve barely scraped the surface of this remarkable novel. It contains many stories and many layers, much that is very recognizable from our ‘real’ world, and lots of potential metaphors to ponder. I wondered at different times if dragoning were a metaphor for menstruation; for puberty; for “un-american activities” (certainly, HUAC seems to conflate them); for simply being independent, self-determining, and female (except that those who dragon are overwhelmingly but not universally girls and women). This story tackles the way we handle difference, and especially gender, sexuality, and gender expression. It contains such maddening (if entirely realistic) renderings of sexism that it was sometimes hard to listen to. It contains transcendent moments of personal discovery, joyful academic inquiry, love and coming-of-age, and some lovely iterations of family and built family, which I always appreciate. “Sometimes,” confides Alex at an advanced age, “the expansive nature of family takes my breath away.” There is such good fun; I especially liked the line “If that dragon was hoping for sympathy, she was crying in front of the wrong teenager,” which I got to share with my favorite dragon-loving teenager. It considers the looping of time and relationships. It’s got science and wonder, a bit like A Tale for the Time Being, but I liked this better. I’m a bit over the moon about it, and am giving it a perfect score. Also, I loved the audio format, with the one caveat that I wish I could pull more quotations that I loved.

Do give it a go, and let me know what you think.

Rating: 10 military-issued boots.

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Cape Fever by Nadia Davids

Posted on November 17, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A lonely colonial woman offers to write letters to the fiancé of her maid and the two become disturbingly intertwined in this evocative gothic tale of race, class, and spirits.

“I come highly recommended to Mrs. Hattingh through sentences I tell her I cannot read.” South African novelist Nadia Davids’s twisting gothic drama Cape Fever, her U.S. debut, opens by highlighting narrator Soraya’s ability to read, which she keeps from her employer. Soraya goes to work for the settler Mrs. Hattingh in 1920: hired as a combined cleaner and cook, the younger woman understands that the elder is not as wealthy as she wishes to appear. In the colonial city in which Mrs. Hattingh reigns over a large, lonely home, Soraya’s close-knit, loving family lives in the nearby Muslim quarter; Soraya is permitted by her employer to visit only rarely. Her father is an artist in religious calligraphy, creating beautiful works of prayer and devotion. The word “proclaim,” he instructs her, is “also read, recite. You see? For us, to read, to recite, is one,” and “The person is a pen. The person is paper.” Soraya’s fiancé, Nour, is an accomplished scholar who works on a farm while saving for teachers’ college.

There are moments in which Soraya feels something like fellowship with her employer, when she intuits that “every woman, rich or poor, madam or maid, dreams of escape.” But working for and living with Mrs. Hattingh, under power structures bigger than the individual, is deeply unpleasant. “She’s never understood the scale of what she wants and asks for.” Soraya retreats, in her small room, into the stories and characters that have come to her all her life: the Gray Women, as she terms the spirits that she alone can see; a seawoman with ink for blood; a woman who makes a baby out of soap. She finds Mrs. Hattingh’s house is teeming with spirits.

Mrs. Hattingh introduces a new comfort and stressor when she offers to write to Nour on Soraya’s behalf. As one woman takes the voice of the other–and intercepts the correspondence that arrives in return–their identities blur in disturbing ways. Soraya holds what she can of her own life in private and cherishes her visits to her family’s home, until even these are forbidden. In the increasingly claustrophobic manor, the tension between the two women builds, resulting in complex layers of psychological intrigue amid themes of class, race, love, grief, and haunting. In Soraya’s compelling voice, Davids blends mysticism, quiet power and resistance, and pain born of a long stretch of history in this unsettling tale of suspense. Cape Fever is beautiful, discomfiting, and moving.

This review originally ran as a *starred review* in the October 28, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 pickled lemons.

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The Midnight Bargain by C. L. Polk

Posted on November 10, 2025 by pagesofjulia

As much as I loved the Kingston Cycle, it’s tempting to say this is my favorite Polk yet. I am really digging the combination of historical setting (including lots of lush clothing detail – not really my area but it’s surprising, richly enjoyable in Polk’s capable writing hands), romance and strong feeling, with a fantasy / speculative framing but around very approachable values. This author has mastered that combination, and it is extremely satisfying to this reader.

In this case, please meet Beatrice Clayborn, the elder daughter of a banker father who has squandered the family’s wealth, and a magician mother who has been collared, literally, so that she cannot practice magic. This is the cost of marriage for female practitioners in the culture Beatrice has been born into. Men have the opportunity to study and improve their practice; women are bound. Beatrice chafes at this rule; she has been practicing her magic in secret, searching for the coded grimoire that will allow her to become a mage. If she succeeds, she will make herself unmarriageable, thereby disappointing her father, but she will also be able to help him improve the family’s financial situation. If she fails, she will be married off to a man of her father’s choosing, collared, denied her true self. We are introduced to Beatrice on the cusp of the bargaining season: she is being presented to high society as an ingenue (read debutante), for the purpose of attracting a suitor (preferably several) and eventually an advantageous marital match.

Bargaining season involves all the primping (clothes! and maquillage), dancing, preening, and social chess you can possibly imagine. It is profoundly not Beatrice’s scene; but it is very much Harriet’s. Harriet is Beatrice’s younger sister, and although she can be a little hard on Beatrice’s nerves, she is also one of the elder sister’s greatest concerns. Beatrice knows that if she fails at bargaining season – if she reveals herself as a “difficult woman,” undesirable, fails to make a match – she will cost Harriet her own chance at the same. Harriet is actually good at these games, and likes them, and deserves her own shot. Beatrice needs to become a mage and prevent her own marriage – but not appear to fail at the social game. It’s complicated.

So she’s struggling to be attractive but not too attractive, and never objectionable (even when the most objectionable men are thrown at her, and even when they are unspeakably rude), and meanwhile she’s struggling to train herself to a very high level of magical performance – and she’s made a new enemy, who might be becoming a friend, and whose brother is interesting. Powerful, wealthy, gorgeous, a capable magician – and he shows a surprising capacity to listen to Beatrice’s opinions on women’s rights. But if Beatrice marries, even for love, even to a man of her own choosing, she will lose her magic forever. She might just wind up facing a lose/lose set of options. But what if there were another way?

I appreciate that Polk’s alt-historical setting feels accurate and real, and the issues at stake – women’s rights, mostly – are both modern and at home in her setting. (Feminism is not new, is it, nor the need.) And I guess part of the reason I find all those period-clothing details so interesting is that they are, in fact, about class and gender and those bargaining season politics. And maybe it’s just a little bit fun to read about the frills and lace and stomachers and fichus and other things I had to look up – I have no time for it in my real life, but part of the fun of reading is to experience other lives, isn’t it? At any rate. This novel was fun and wrenching and powerful and just absorbing, and I would read another twenty-five of them by this author; I hope they are writing furiously and keep doing it for a long time. What’s next??

Rating: 9 picnic baskets.

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Harmattan Season by Tochi Onyebuchi

Posted on October 13, 2025 by pagesofjulia

My first Onyebuchi is an interesting one to characterize as to genre. Harmattan Season is a PI story with some classic noir elements: protagonist Boubacar is down on his luck, a little self-sabotaging, unsure of what he’s working toward, fighting some old demons and secrets. It’s historical fiction, set in a West African nation under French colonial rule in a not-quite-modern timeline. It’s fantasy, or speculative fiction: there is magic afoot. One could argue it’s dystopian, but the colonial rule bit kind of covers that already.

Onyebuchi has a firm grasp of pacing and suspense, and Bouba is a compelling central character. He’s mixed race, or deux fois (“two times”), half French and half indigenous, and struggles with that identity: does it mean he gets part of each of two worlds? Or none of either? Does he fit in a little bit everywhere, or nowhere at all? The reader will learn slowly that his in-between status is further indicated morally by some of his past actions.

“Fortune always left whatever room I walked into, which is why I don’t leave my place much these days.” In the opening scene, Bouba is awakened in the middle of the night by banging on his front door. A woman stumbles in, holding a bleeding abdominal wound. She asks him to hide her; he does, as the police arrive next. One of them, it turns out, is an old associate of Bouba’s – you might even say a friend, or the closest thing he has. They leave. The woman has vanished. Unpaid, Bouba spend most of the rest of the novel trying to solve the mystery of the bleeding woman: who she was, what happened to her. He will uncover many layers of intrigue, wrongdoing, and attempted corrections, in spheres both political and personal.

I think a better grasp of West African history and politics would have given me a deeper understanding of some plot elements – and some linguistic background might have helped as well. There were a few unfamiliar words, some of which I got from French (like deux fois), some of which seem to belong to Onyebuchi’s fictional world (dugulenw), but some of which are not his invention (like the title’s harmattan, a dry seasonal West African wind). How many of the latter, or how many slight variations or references, did I miss? This is a good example of how reading ‘the other’ can be a bit more challenging but also why it’s important to do it. I’m just noting where I might have missed some nuance. Partly, I think, for this reason, I had a slow time getting engaged with the momentum of the plot, but we got there, and I wound up feeling involved with Bouba’s wellbeing and that of the community he gradually decided he belonged to.

I think Onyebuchi is a skilled writer with a fascinating and fresh take on genre intersections, and I’m curious about what else he’s done.

Rating: 7 apples.

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shorts by C. L. Polk: “St. Valentine, St. Abigail, St. Brigid”; Ivy, Angelica, Bay; The Music of the Siphorophenes

Posted on October 6, 2025 by pagesofjulia

I have been missing Polk’s Kingston Cycle (starting with Witchmark), and was pleased to find a few shorts (for free!) on their website. Here are one short story and two novelettes. (The last is offered with two spellings! Apologies if I’ve used the ‘wrong’ one here.)

“St. Valentine, St. Abigail, St. Brigid” is a short story with some sweetness in its protagonist’s devotion, and in the honey produced by her mother’s bees, but also darkness, in the prices we pay and the love that is not returned. Theresa’s mother is a powerful magician, a mistress of the bees. Theresa was the price she exacted from a client. She is protected and privileged, but not loved. She will make her own deals for the sake of her own affections. As I recognize from other Polk works, this story combines a dreamy, weighted atmosphere and deep feeling in a delicious blend, with a mythic tone and a character I care deeply about in just a short span of time.

I was even better pleased to find Theresa again, grown up, in Ivy, Angelica, Bay. The heartbreak hits a bit harder here, perhaps because we are growing up. But she’s coming into her powers, as well. The ending offers a twist I love, with opportunities; I wonder if we might hope for more fiction, perhaps at novel-length, in this world: Theresa and the other mistresses of the bees who come before and after, and the world of good people but also darkness in which they move.

The Music of the Siphorophones or Siphorophenes (no cover image I could find) comes from a slightly differently imagined world. Where the bees wield their power in a world that looks a lot like ours, this novelette reminds me a bit of The Expanse: space pilots in a future universe in which ‘spacers’ (who live on ships and stations and planets far from human origins) have developed very differently from ‘grounders’ (mostly-Earthbound people), and there are galaxies’ worth of threats to consider in interspace travel, from pirates to intrigue in politics and entertainment, and good old-fashioned human trauma. But also the Sirens, who offer (reputedly) something like a religious experience to those lucky enough to encounter them. There will be big moral questions on offer for our small cast of characters here, and again, opportunity for this world to grow into more writings for Polk, if they desire it. I hope they do.

This continues to be a talent I’d like to hear more from.

Rating: 7 bulbs of water.

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The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle by T.L. Huchu

Posted on September 12, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Book three of Edinburgh Nights (The Library of the Dead; Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments) might be the best yet. Ropa is still pushing on in her unpaid internship for the Society of Sceptical Enquirers (or rather, its secretary, her patron, Sir Ian Callander), and at this book’s start, she finds herself at Dunvegan Castle on the Scottish Isle of Skye, assisting with the biennual conference. This should be low-level drudgery, but Callander is good about keeping Ropa handy; and anyway, events quickly take a turn for the unusual, necessitating Ropa’s special skills in solving mysteries. A prestigious Ethiopian magician comes to visit, a priceless ancient scroll (valued both as an antiquity and for the secrets it contains) is stolen, and a librarian – Ropa’s favorite, in fact – is murdered. And our young hero is on deck to save the day. But where she has some experience solving crimes and battling magicians, here at Dunvegan she might just be outclassed. Everybody on site except Ropa, it seems, is a professionally trained magician. Academia and the Society have turned out much less virtuous than she’d imagined. With the written advice of Niccolò Machiavelli running through her mind, Ropa decides she can trust no one. Even her heroes are suspects.

This might be the saddest in the series, as Ropa becomes disillusioned with the society and the Society she had been so keen to join. We continue to admire her for her own strong morals, even if standing on principle sometimes gets her in arguably unnecessary trouble. But her ideals are shaken as she finds out that the people she’d looked up to are fallible.

That said, it’s a great story, expertly paced and compelling, with characters we care about. And I was thinking this was a trilogy, but this book ends on a hell of a cliffhanger, and I’m glad to see there are four published books in the series with a fifth due in December! So I’m pleased to be hooked by Huchu’s singular and unforgettable young ghostalker-turned-investigator. Get on board.

Rating: 8 servings of cranachan.

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Witchcraft by Sole Otero, trans. by Andrea Rosenberg

Posted on September 8, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This graphic novel follows an unusual household over several centuries in Buenos Aires, Argentina, through various characters whose lives are impacted, if not ruined, by three enigmatic sisters.

Argentinean comics artist Sole Otero (Mothballs) offers a tale that meanders through historical and speculative fiction with Witchcraft, a graphic novel that spans centuries in Buenos Aires. In Otero’s evolving but recognizable visual style, the opening scene emerges spookily from the fog, as a ship arrives in Nuestra Señora del Buen Ayre in 1768. (One of a series of footnotes explains that this was the original name of Buenos Aires, given by the conqueror Pedro de Mendoza.) Readers see three women disembark with their goat, taking with them the three-year-old son of another passenger, to the latter’s wails of despair. From these early, atmospheric pages, a sense of unease is established and maintained.

The following sections of the narrative undertake large jumps in time. In more or less present-day Buenos Aires, a man tells his friend a scarcely credible story of nude women dancing around entranced nude men, with a goat and a chalk circle and “this super creepy music.” In an earlier, historical setting, a Mapuche woman goes to work at a grand estate for three sisters who are both feared and respected in their local village, to a horrifying end. In modern times, a reclusive woman exchanges e-mails with a similarly lonely man, the veterinarian who came on a house call to look at her sick cat; he tells strange, disturbing tales about his family and the elderly goat they want him to save. A nunnery sends an allegedly evil orphan girl to live with three sisters who normally adopt only boys. From these and other narrative threads, populated by spirits, witch hunts, pleas and losses, readers begin to piece together the fractured story of the María sisters and their unusual, perhaps supernatural, habits.

Otero’s style of illustration varies somewhat between sections, but is often distorted or off-kilter, and highly detailed; in full color, her characters’ facial expressions and contortions advance the unnerving atmosphere of the larger story. Page spreads may include carefully spaced panels or no panels at all; text style likewise shifts, with infrequent footnotes to help readers along. This results in a sinister, mysterious, and deeply compelling reading experience. Translated by Andrea Rosenberg (who also translated Otero’s Mothballs), Witchcraft blends horror, dark magic and dark humor, rage and righteousness. This disjointed, sometimes discomfiting, entertaining story addresses colonial power and indigenous resistance alongside ritual, sex, and sacrifice in an eerie, phantasmagoric package not soon forgotten.

This review originally ran in the August 18, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 trees climbed.

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Sister Creatures by Laura Venita Green

Posted on September 1, 2025 by pagesofjulia

From rural Louisiana to locations around the globe, the same problems and secrets follow a quartet of girls-become-women in this arresting, unnerving, and wise debut novel.

With Sister Creatures, Laura Venita Green invites her reader to navigate a shape-shifting world, beginning in rural Louisiana and ranging overseas and into starscapes and imagination. Rotating among a small group of girls and women, this imaginative narrative muddies the line between the novel’s real world and a fictional one within it. The result is dreamy, often disturbing, and hauntingly unforgettable.

In the opening scene, Tess uses her isolated job as a live-in nanny to hide away from the life she feels has already cratered, at age 20, with her heavy drinking. A neighboring teenager, Gail, makes a disquieting appearance: she is clearly not well, perhaps in danger, but rejects Tess’s half-hearted offer to help. The older girl “hat[es] how relieved she felt not to have to deal with anything.” Gail’s plight becomes a legend to the other characters until she makes a reappearance as an adult at the novel’s end. Meanwhile, Tess grows up and has a daughter of her own, lives around the world as part of a military family, but struggles to escape the problems she hid from in Pinecreek, La. Her former best friend, Lainey, leaves Louisiana as well, resulting in permanent banishment at the hands of a troubled younger sister. Another young woman, Olivia, wrestles with the local options, characterized as “Jesus and booze,” and with a sexuality not likely to be tolerated there. And then there is a recurring character whose entire reality seems in question. While they all choose to leave Pinecreek, the struggles that originate in their shared hometown follow these characters to Munich, Baltimore, New York City, and beyond.

In their parallel comings-of-age, and across generations, Green’s characters thread their paths between love and spite, affection and abuse. Their loose connections and jumps in chronology reward close attention, contributing to a slightly off-balance reader experience that is very much a part of the novel’s atmosphere. Sister Creatures blurs the concepts of reality and of right and wrong. Are the woods–of Louisiana, Maryland, or Bavaria–sanctuary or threat? Who is real and who is made up? Green’s narrative offers a strong literary bent, as characters interact with “The Yellow Wallpaper,” old fairy tales, misogyny, motherhood, and their own creative pursuits. They hurt each other, but they help each other, too; this is a novel ruled by nuance and surreality as well as the all-too-real.

Sister Creatures is often unsettling, but pairs moments of great sweetness alongside discomfiting ones. This novel remains thought-provoking long after its final pages.

This review originally ran in the August 12, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 cut-out musical notes.

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Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments by T.L. Huchu

Posted on August 29, 2025 by pagesofjulia

At the start of book 2 of the Edinburgh Nights series, young Ropa Moyo thinks she’s got a big break with an apprenticeship at the Society of Sceptical Enquirers, working directly with Sir Callander, Scotland’s top magician. But in the opening scene, her apprenticeship is downgraded to an unpaid internship. The big shots who work highly regarded “scientific magic” in this culture see this as a role with honor and opportunity–Callander has not taken an intern in many years–but Ropa is not exactly a member of that rank of society. She and her Gran and little sister Izwi live in a slum, in poverty, and Ropa is their sole wage earner. She cannot afford “unpaid.” (Race is not a very ‘forward’ issue in these books, but Ropa’s family is originally from Zimbabwe, and those roots influence the style of magic she’s learned from her Gran and which puts her a bit at odds with the establishment.)

Luckily, her buddy Priya has the lead on a side job: figuring out the nature of illness for a young patient at Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments. And, because Ropa is resourceful and always hustling, another mystery presents itself as well, one that might actually come with a serious paycheck. (Our protagonist is always worried about medications and medical care for Gran, and schooling for the precocious Izwi.) Chasing one puzzle and another, trying to impress the society and keep her family afloat, hard-working Ropa alternates between hopefulness and despair. Interestingly – and in a departure, as far as my memory serves, from The Library of the Dead – the case(s) here are tangled up with Scottish history and old wrongs.

Ropa’s unmistakable, unforgettable narrative voice is a big part of the charm to these novels. She offers a mix of a sort of classic, hard-boiled detective’s cynicism with a teenaged variety of same, and a youthful (not quite naïve) optimism, with both sardonic wit and earnest love for her family and friends. There is significant slang to season that combination to boot. I’d recognize Ropa anywhere, and although I have to look up the odd word, I’m always stimulated, intrigued, and entertained.

I hope it goes without saying that I’m all in for book 3 of this trilogy.

Rating: 7 movie posters.

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Open Wide by Jessica Gross

Posted on August 18, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This mind-bending novel examines the nature of love and the social conventions that govern relationships and asks where limits should be drawn, if at all.

Jessica Gross (Hysteria) staggers and challenges readers with her sophomore novel, Open Wide, starring a socially awkward protagonist who finds love and dives in very, very deeply.

Olive compulsively records all the hours of her life, “collecting sounds the way other people collect stamps.” She records diegetic sounds, which she uses in her work as a radio producer, and conversations, which she plays back–to study what went right or wrong, to soothe or arouse herself. She has long yearned for romance when she meets Theo, a handsome colorectal surgeon. He agrees with Olive’s proffered metaphor: people’s insides look like pink pasta. Olive can’t get enough. She wants to spend every night together. She wants to “climb inside” him.

Alongside their deepening love affair, Olive reveals to readers her relationships with her sisters and mother, through which Gross also explores boundaries (or lack thereof) and obsessive love. “My mother had climbed inside of me. My little self, filled with her bigger one. Her daughter, who was not supposed to be the vessel, but the one contained.” However, Theo is not parent or child to Olive but partner, so their intimacy is different, Olive tells herself.

Olive’s first-person narration of her bizarre story is an inspired choice that makes readers privy to her fears, confusions, passions, and rationalizations. By the final pages, which reveal what has changed in Olive’s surreal world, readers will feel dizzy with her perspective and its consequences. Open Wide is a tense, engrossing examination of the bounds of love.

This review originally ran in the August 8, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 7 dog walks.

Stay tuned for my upcoming interview with Gross.

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