Did people discourage you from following your dreams?

Perhaps they said, that’s not a job for girls (or for boys). Or, in our family, we go to college. I always dreamed you’d be a doctor. But what about the family business? I didn’t work this hard so you could throw it away on… Our people don’t… Or, that’s a hobby, not something you pursue as a career – how do you expect to support yourself doing X?

What did you do about it?

In Dragonsong, the main character, Menolly – who is “too clever by half” with her fingers and would have made “a fine big strong lad” – experiences the world through music. Anything that happens to her translates itself into song. Luckily, her passion was discovered and nurtured by the local Harper, a role that uses music to educate the children (and entertain the community). But even her elderly mentor told her that women can’t be Harpers. Her stern parents agree: there is real work to be done, work that isn’t a waste of time, work that benefits the community. She has been spared from that real work to be the Harper’s caregiver and teaching assistant only because he had grown too feeble to do the work himself.

As the book opens, Menolly is singing her friend’s funeral dirge. And, once his body is released to the sea, it becomes clear that her parents’ tolerance of her passion for music is over. While the rural fishing community awaits the arrival of the new Harper, Menolly is assigned to maintain the children’s education, but she is firmly told not to expect to continue later and not to practice her own music – in short, to stop enjoying music. She is clearly the scapegoat of the family, assigned the dirtiest, messiest chores, and spied on by her sister.

She does her best to obey but, when she inadvertently slips – just once, just for a moment – her father beats her, and her mother allows a hand injury to heal in a way that prevents her from playing music ever again. She isn’t even allowed to sing along with the community when the new Harper arrives.

Deprived of music, her world grows dark. Her only escape occurs when she assigned to forage the surrounding beaches and marshlands for crustaceans and water greens. On one of these journeys, she is caught out too far in a storm and takes refuge in a cave inhabited by hawk-sized dragons. That’s when it occurs to her that she doesn’t have to return to the repression of her family and her community, she can live on her own and play music whenever she wants…

When I was a teen, my mother wanted me to be a lawyer. She had it all planned out, but then she got distracted and didn’t realize, until it was almost too late, that I had only applied for drama programs. She pleaded with me to go to Yale – as if it were that easy – so I could switch from drama to law when I came to my senses. I was lucky and, in the end, my parents supported me financially until I graduated from college. But, in the end, their disapproval had embedded itself in me and I gave up drama and writing for “a real job.”

Plenty of parents are not supportive of who their children are becoming as teens. One of my sister’s friends used to take refuge at our house because his father would beat him for the way he dressed, for the fact that he was coming out as [gasp] gay. When the father realized that my mother was sheltering his son, giving him a place where he could be himself, the man forbid the boy from coming to our home and threatened my mother with legal action if she took him in again. My mother didn’t have a leg to stand on: in the neighboring farm community where the boy’s family lived, a parent had a lot of leeway for managing a child who strayed from the norms.

Menolly escapes her family’s disapproval and physical abuse. Although the world around her community is physically perilous, she accepts that risk over the loss of her passion, of who she is. The life she creates for herself is harsh and uncomfortable; she lives simply, with the dragons who accept her for who she is.

I often gift this book to teen girls of friends and family. To me, this book says don’t give in, no matter how hard they push you: stand up for yourself, take a risk, pursue your passion, even if it means you live uncomfortably at first because you have to do it on your own.

It’s a message we all need to hear now and then.