How do you handle loss?
I’ve read Kelly Barnhill’s 2016 Newbery Medal-winning book The Girl Who Drank the Moon twice now, once for pleasure and once for this review. The first time I read it, I was fixated on the storyline of the Day of Sacrifice, and the people being lied to in order to maintain an oppressive regime. The second time around, I was struck by the story’s underlying theme, and how each of the characters relate to that theme in different ways.
Once a year, an isolated town leaves the youngest baby in the nearby forest as a “sacrifice” for an evil witch, lest she destroy everything. But it quickly turns out the story isn’t true, and the witch Xan who witnesses the tradition has started her own of feeding starlight to the babies and taking them to other towns, where they’re adopted by new families. One year, Xan accidentally feeds moonlight to a baby, giving her more magic than she can handle. Xan adopts the baby herself, naming her Luna. As Luna grows, some in the town start to question the Day of Sacrifice tradition. Luna’s mother is deemed insane and locked in a tower, but she too has power and refuses to forget about her lost daughter. Another town local, Antain, believes he can kill the evil witch so no babies will ever be sacrificed again. As Luna’s power grows, Xan’s life fades away. And as paths collide, everyone comes face-to-face with a long-buried truth of what they all have in common.
The Girl Who Drank the Moon is an engaging, if not chaotic middle grade book. The characters, world-building, and plot threads gave me Terry Pratchet vibes from time to time, but with the author’s own spin on the fantasy tropes. That said, there are a lot of subplots to follow through the story, and it takes until the end of the book to see how they all come together. But what stood out to me in my second read-through was one of the biggest, if not the biggest theme of The Girl Who Drank the Moon: grief.
“From our family? Yes, dearest. Ever so long ago. Before you were born. He was a beautiful boy. Now finish your supper and see to your chores.”
Obviously, there is the grief of the town abandoning a baby in the forest every year, and at least every family has been impacted by this tradition in some way. There is also grief from characters outside the town, who have experienced their own losses but haven’t yet made peace with them. There are even losses that occur within the story. And the characters respond to those losses in different ways. Some handle their pain by bringing as much of it onto others as possible, to make them just as miserable as they are. Some hide their grief away, either because it’s too much for them to bear or out of fear of exploitation. But there are some characters who bring their grief into the sun, wearing it on their sleeves and allowing it to shape who they are and how they relate to others. And the characters who do this are the heroes of the story. There’s a saying that grief is the last gift we give to the people we love. The heroes come to understand this on a subconscious level, even though this phrase is never uttered at any point, and they refuse to hide that love away for the sake of being strong and carrying on.
We’ve spent decades believing that strength comes from ignoring our pain, ignoring our feelings, and going about every day business as usual. And sometimes, we do have to push aside our personal feelings for something else. But ignoring pain and grief for too long leaves us jaded, cynical, and blind to all the good happening around us. Confronting that grief, holding onto the love behind the grief, and allowing that love to shape who we are and how we live—that is where true strength lies.
Many thanks for reading.
If you like the work I do and want to see more of it, please consider joining me over on Patreon. For as little as $5.00 a month, you can get early access to book reviews, writer’s updates, and chats about books and reading. But wait, there’s more! Join my Short Story tier for $10.00 a month, and you get access to bonus content like editorials and short stories. And if you have a little extra to spare, joining my Novel tier for $15.00 a month will grant you exclusive sneak peaks of upcoming projects, lost content, and the option to be named in the Acknowledgements of any book I publish.
To see more of my work and support what I do, please visit https://patreon.com/LGAlfonso and consider becoming a member. Hope to see you there!
