Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Girl Who Drank the Moon, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Family and Love
Storytelling, Censorship, and Control
Memory, Forgetting, and the Future
Sorrow vs. Hope
Summary
Analysis
Luna wakes in the night with a horrible headache right behind her forehead. Her temperature fluctuates and her hands seem to glow. The crow caws “Luna” and Luna insists she’s fine, but she knows it’s a lie. She steps outside and without thinking, she puts her hand in the air to gather starlight. She puts the starlight in her mouth and it calms her. Luna and the crow follow a trail to a stone standing in grass. It reads, “don’t forget.” It swings open and the crow expresses hesitation, but Luna walks down the stairs into a workshop. The crow continues to nervously caw as Luna looks through books full of scribbles that make no sense. Nobody’s there, but there’s no dust either. Even stranger is that out of the windows, Luna can see daylight and a smoking peak on the mountain instead of a crater.
Luna presumably walks into the old castle here, which suggests that her magic is erupting just enough for her to be able to see it and gather starlight without going into a trance. This suggests that Luna is getting to the point where she can begin to remember and begin to learn, thereby putting her in a position where she can figure out who she is, how she came to be a part of Xan and Glerk’s family, and how she can protect everyone that she loves going forward with her newfound power.
Themes
Luna whispers that something is wrong. A piece of paper that says “don’t forget” flies into her hand and Luna shouts that nobody tells her anything. However, she knows this isn’t true: Glerk and Xan tell her things, but the things they say fly away. Luna’s headache intensifies as another piece of paper flies into her hand. The sentence has no first word, so it reads that something is the most fundamental element of the universe. Luna commands that the word show itself, and the pain in her head releases. She can read the letters. She sounds them out and shakily pronounces “magic.”
As far as Luna is concerned, she can’t forget anything because nobody tells her anything. However, when she finally starts to remember that Glerk and Xan tried to tell her things, Luna is able to come to a better understanding of her childhood. Now, she recognizes that she has all sorts of knowledge stored in her that, if she can access it, will be able to help her make sense of her world and her role in it.
Themes
