it might interest you to know that in the UK, When Women Were Dragons is published by Hot Key Books, which is a YA imprint. I did feel, reading it, that it wasn't quite YA, but it also didn't quite feel adult either, so I was a bit ?? I suppose it sits in the crossover space.

I think I enjoyed it more than you did, but I did have a few quibbles with it. like you said, it pulls its punches a bit, I would've liked it to be a bit, idk, *more* somehow. but one of my sticking points was that the knots thing was unresolved?? I felt like the narrative was leading up to the knots being significant scientifically/magically as a way to control dragoning, and that just petered out into a big fat nothing of an unresolved plot thread. that annoyed me SO much more than anything else, and i can't even explain why. the book also stood out to me as very white.