95 pages • 3 hours read
Kelly BarnhillThe Girl Who Drank the Moon
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “In Which a Story Is Told”
A parent opens the novel by telling a child that there is a Witch in the woods. While no one has seen the Witch, and all hope never to see her, everyone still knows she exists. The child questions the storyteller, wondering how people know the Witch is real. The parent points to the perils of the forest, naming the “poisonous smoke” and “boiling geysers” (2) as evidence. Obviously, the Witch created these dangers.
The parent explains, despite insisting the child already knows the story, that the Witch demands a yearly sacrifice of the youngest child in the village. On the Day of Sacrifice, all the people must be present to offer thanks to the baby that will save them from the Witch for another year. The child asks if their family ever had to give up a child, and the parent replies that yes, a long time ago they gave up a baby boy. The child wonders why the parent didn’t fight to keep him. The parent responds fatalistically that it would be impossible: The Witch would destroy them all. That’s just how things are and will always be. Tired of the child’s questions, the parent sends the child away.
Chapter 2 Summary: “In Which an Unfortunate Woman Goes Quite Mad”
It is the Day of Sacrifice in the Protectorate, a city located between the dangerous Forest and the life-giving Bog. In the Protectorate there is a wide dichotomy between the lives of regular citizens and those of the Council of Elders. The Elders own everything. They enjoy wealth, possessions, and good food, while ordinary families struggle to make a living from the Bog.
Grand Elder Gherland is the Council’s self-important leader. He and the Council know that there is no Witch in the wood and there never has been, but the yearly child sacrifice keeps the citizens sad and compliant, and allows the Elders to maintain their power and comfortable lifestyle. Gherland’s nephew, Antain, is almost 13. He is an Elder-in-Training. Gherland is fond of Antain but doesn’t like all his questions.
Gherland, the Elders, and Antain go to the home of the woman whose baby is to be sacrificed. She refuses to give up the infant. Gherland is upset and irritated. In the Protectorate, “no one broke the rules” (6) like this. The mother hangs from the ceiling rafters; her long black hair streams around her as she clutches the child and shrieks defiantly. Gherland feigns kindness and tries ineffectually to reason with her. Finally he announces that the woman has gone mad and needs to be cared for in the Tower. Specially trained soldiers, the Sisters of the Star, subdue the woman and give Gherland the child. Gherland notices that the baby girl has black hair, black eyes, and “luminous skin, like polished amber” (9-10). She also has a crescent moon birthmark on her forehead, like her mother.
In the woods, the Elders lay the child inside a tree-ringed clearing. Antain, ignorant of the Elders’ secret, wants to wait and make sure wild animals don’t hurt her, which Gherland knows is exactly what will happen. He hurries them back to the Protectorate, believing they will never see the child again.
Chapter 3 Summary: “In Which a Witch Accidentally Enmagics an Infant”
The Elders are wrong: There is a Witch in the wood, named Xan. She is gray-haired, short, and a little pudgy, with kind eyes and a ready smile. Every Day of Sacrifice, Xan travels from her home in the woods to rescue the baby left by the Protectorate. Xan does not know why the mothers abandon their children. Xan feeds each baby starlight and carries them to the Free Cities to be adopted by loving families. The Free Cities call Xan’s arrival Star Child Day. Starlight brings out every good quality in the babies, and they grow to be happy, good-hearted adults.
Before Xan picks up this year’s baby, she mediates a quarrel between her two friends, Glerk and Fyrian. Glerk is a millennia-old swamp monster. He has two sets of arms, seven fingers on each hand, and a long tail. Glerk is intelligent and thoughtful, and often quotes poetry to underscore his opinions. Fyrian is a Perfectly Tiny Dragon. Five hundred years ago, Xan promised Fyrian’s mother she would look after him. Glerk is upset that Xan treats Fyrian as a baby and lets Fyrian believe he will become a Simply Enormous Dragon someday. Xan urges Glerk to apologize for being mean to Fyrian; Glerk agrees.
On her journey to the Protectorate, Xan travels through the Forest, which is not cursed but is dangerous because of a volcano stirring underground. Xan finds the child with the crescent moon birthmark but, entranced by the baby’s dark eyes and steady gaze, doesn’t take her directly to the Free Cities.
Xan accidentally feeds the baby moonlight instead of starlight. While starlight confers a blessing, moonlight “enmagics” things. Xan knows the magic-filled baby is now too dangerous for regular people to raise, so Xan adopts her. Xan names her Luna and declares she will be Luna’s grandmother, and they will be a family.
Chapter 4 Summary: “In Which It Was Just a Dream”
A child wonders what the Witch does with the babies she takes every year. The parent replies shortly that the Witch must eat them but then admits that’s not truly what they think. The parent shares various theories passed down from mother and grandmother. Maybe the Witch eats the babies’ souls and they wander around like zombies. Perhaps the Witch keeps them as slaves. None of these stories ring true, however, because surely someone would notice the zombies, or at least one slave would have escaped and returned home. Instead, the parent refuses to think about it. Yet the parent does admit to having a dream about the child’s older brother, the one who was sacrificed. The parent dreams he is now a handsome, starry-eyed teenager, and sees him kissing a girl. The child observes that the parent is crying. The parent denies crying, saying it was all “just a dream” (29).
Chapter 5 Summary: “In Which a Swamp Monster Accidentally Falls in Love”
Xan brings baby Luna home, delighting Fyrian. A loving, exuberant, “tone-deaf” dragon with a tendency to sneeze and set things on fire, Fyrian is “about the same size as a dove” (35). Because his mother told him, just before her death, that Fyrian is and will be “a giant upon this fair earth” (35), Fyrian believes he is huge and must be kept away from the rest of the world. Fyrian thinks that Glerk and Xan are also giants. Glerk doesn’t like this deception. Glerk also isn’t initially taken with Luna. He warns Xan (and himself, privately) not to fall in love with the baby.
The three find that raising a baby involves a lot of changes: piles of diapers, clothes, bottles, and toys now clutter their home. Luna is also a noisy baby who makes sounds when she is happy, sad, and all times in-between. Fyrian would like Xan to use magic to quiet Luna, but Xan replies that magic must not be used to control another person.
Glerk recites poetry to Luna as he carries her around their homestead. One day Luna says Glerk’s name, winning his heart completely. Both Glerk and Xan can see the magic running under Luna’s skin and notice how moonlight and starlight are drawn to her. Luna continues to drink moonlight in her sleep. Glerk and Xan know that “magical babies are dangerous babies” (38) and worry as Luna’s magic doubles each year over the next two years. Luna grows to be an active, mischievous, inquisitive child. They stop worrying about when Luna’s magic might express itself and decide that education will help keep her busy. Glerk will teach poetry and language, Xan will teach science, and Fyrian will teach math. Glerk tells Luna a poem about the coming of spring and the changes it brings.
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
The majority of The Girl Who Drank the Moon is told from a third-person omniscient perspective: The narrator knows the feelings and thoughts of all the characters. But Barnhill also incorporates sections of first-person narration in which a parent tells stories to a child. A first-person narrator is more likely to be unreliable than a third-person narrator. They may be deliberately untruthful or may have a distorted perception of facts. We see already that the first-person parent narrator in The Girl Who Drank the Moon mistakenly believes that an evil Witch demands the yearly sacrifice of infants. We know that Gherland uses stories of the Witch to cow the populace, and that Xan, a real witch, is the kindly rescuer of infants. These first chapters introduce the theme of the power of stories to both deceive and to tell the truth.
The Protectorate is a repressive society. It is surrounded by walls, and its rules are enforced by the Sisters of the Star, a “frightening force.” Even the name, “Protectorate,” signifies a territory that is controlled or protected by a stronger one. It stands in sharp contrast to the Free Cities, where citizens live in happy, prosperous communities. Xan, for instance, refuses to take the Road on her journey because it is “owned and operated by a gang of thugs and bullies from the Protectorate” (19). The Council of Elders ensures that the Protectorate citizens are kept “frightened,” “subdued,” and “compliant” (12) by their stories of the Witch and by (what the Council assumes is) the gruesome but necessary murder of a baby. The Council discourages independent thought, as evidenced by Gherland’s unease with Antain’s curiosity and his willingness to ominously “deal with him” (5) if this inquisitiveness persists. The parental narrator accepts and perpetuates the Council’s narrative, telling the child to stop asking questions and to simply agree with the way things are. The suppression of ideas evolves into one of the novel’s important themes.
Another name for the Protectorate is “City of Sorrows” (4). The Council of Elders benefits from maintaining its sorrowful status quo: Grieving people have no energy or interest in starting an uprising and unseating the Elders’ wealth and authority. Sorrow is incapacitating. Sorrow also becomes a major theme in the novel, and its form of expression—cloudiness and fogginess—is a significant motif. Xan notes that the city is “dismal” and that sorrow hangs “over the roofs of its houses like a cloud” (20).
Other characters also tell themselves—and their friends—deceptive stories. While Xan feeds Luna moonlight, she tells herself that she doesn’t notice the different consistency of the magic: “She said it over and over and over until it felt true” (26), suggesting Xan knew quite well but wanted to convince herself otherwise. Similarly, Glerk believes that Xan is “feeding and perpetuating” (17) Fyrian’s delusions that he will someday grow into a large dragon. Although Fyrian is older than her, Xan continues to believe Fyrian is just a baby, and Glerk acquiesces to perpetuating the fiction.
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