Sometimes books are called children’s books because the title character is a child. But, many of them are books that a person of any age should find and read.
The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill is one of them. It won the 2017 Newberry Medal awarded for the “most distinguished American children’s book” but it’s much more than that. It’s a tale of love, memory, regret, self-determination, and connection.
The story starts in The Protectorate, a community between a giant bog and a forest that has a dangerous volcano beneath it. Many of its residents are descended from people who fled the forest when the volcano last erupted. The Protectorate is ruled by a group of men called the Elders, who use intimidation to keep the people in line. Aiding them are the Sisters of the Stars, an order who studies natural sciences and combat.
The Elders’ main way of controlling the people is the Day of Sacrifice, where they take the youngest baby into the forest and abandon it. They tell the people that the witch in the forest needs to be appeased, lest she attack them all. But the Elders really think that they are just leaving the baby to die and there was never a witch.
They were wrong.
There was a witch, a kindly old woman named Xan. Every year, she collects the babies and brings them across the forest to a loving new family in the Free Cities. During the journey, Xan feeds each baby with starlight. The light gives the baby lifelong good fortune but it isn’t strong enough to make them magic. The light of the moon does, however, and one year Xan accidentally feeds a baby moonlight.
Xan knows that the baby will be too magical for a new family, so she brings her home and names her Luna. As Luna grows her magic starts to show, too much of it for such a young child to control or understand.
Xan seals the magic inside Luna, until she turns thirteen, and hopes that she’ll be able to explain it to Luna when the time is right.
The second thread in The Girl Who Drank the Moon is about a young man named Antain, who as an apprentice to the Elders, had to pull Luna from her mother’s arms. Eventually, he left the Elders’ service to forge his own path. He never forgot the baby or her mother. Antain seeks the woman out, now a seemingly mad prisoner held in the Sisters’ tower. He knows something is very wrong in his community but has few allies.
What’s so wonderful about the story is that it never shies away from hard emotions. The fear that Xan feels for Luna’s safety, Anatin’s guilt, and Luna’s mother’s grief. Almost everyone has had a trauma, they’re not glossed over and help guide the characters forward. They all feel love, too. Love is what strengthens them, unites them, and helps them overcome.
The Girl Who Drank the Moon may be called a children’s book but it never talks down to the reader. Not in the emotions, nor the vocabulary, or of the little snippets of real science entwined with the magic. I loved it and am so glad that it came to me at a time where being reminded to keep your heart open is always a good thing.
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