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
The parent tells their child that a witch (but not the Witch) made the volcano thousands of years ago. Nobody knows how old the Witch is, but she sometimes looks like a girl and sometimes looks like an old woman. The volcano might still have dragons in it, but nobody has seen them. The Witch might have eaten them. Each time the volcano erupts, it’s bigger and more ferocious. The Witch caused the last eruption and it made the forest unsafe. She hated happiness, so she ordered her dragons into the volcano to make it erupt. The dragons were afraid of her and had no choice. The Witch laughed at them when they suggested she was going to destroy the world. The brave wizard saved everyone, but the volcano is now just furious. One day, everyone will die when it erupts.
By this point, the novel has made it fairly clear that the reader shouldn’t take any of the parent’s stories at face value, given that Xan’s lived experience has disproved most of them—and since the Witch herself isn’t actually real. However, keep in mind that by crafting a Witch who’s powerful enough to terrify dragons, the storyteller can create a villain whom people wouldn’t dream of standing up to. Again, the tragic ending to the story and the society’s overall pessimistic outlook teaches people that life in the Protectorate is pointless and tenuous to begin with and that they should just accept their circumstances, since everyone will inevitably die thanks to the Witch.
Themes
