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
At five years old, Luna’s magic has doubled five times. Glerk worries that she’s going to burst at some point, but Xan suggests that maybe things will never be difficult. The narrator notes that while Xan loves finding homes for abandoned babies, she hates sad, hard, or unpleasant things. Later, Glerk rocks Luna to sleep and feels her magic pulsing. Xan tells him he’s imagining things and focuses on raising Luna, who is a mischievous and curious child, magic or not.
For Xan, finding the abandoned babies homes is a hopeful and positive thing because she chooses to focus on the families she’s building in the Free Cities, not the trauma that parents in the Protectorate experience. This shows how someone can choose to actively reframe horrific experiences into something more positive.
Themes
Xan visits the Free Cities two times per year. She takes Luna once per year, but doesn’t take her for Star Child Day, doesn’t tell her about the abandoned babies, and doesn’t tell her about the Protectorate. She knows that she’ll have to tell Luna at some point, but she reasons that it’s too sad and Luna is too little. On one trip with Luna, Xan tries to shrink a tumor in a woman’s brain as Luna touches a lump of bread dough and says that it’s a hat. Annoyed, Xan asks a boy to take Luna outside. Later, Xan sees that the bread dough actually is a hat—Luna’s magic shimmers silver and blue around it.
Xan’s thought process here shows that she loves Luna deeply—but regardless, not letting Luna know about the Star Children or the Protectorate means that Luna doesn’t have the knowledge she needs to make sense of her place in the world. Again, this makes the case that a person’s intentions don’t matter when they’re trying to censor information. No matter what, Luna will suffer because Xan chooses to keep things from her.
Themes
Xan works quickly for the next few days as Luna wreaks havoc. She climbs to impossible heights and turns houses into birds, and she has no idea what she’s doing. Xan cleans up after her and finally puts Luna to sleep with magic, which makes her feel horrible. Zosimos was very clear that Xan should never do something like that. Xan scoops up Luna and thinks that she’s missing something and needs to remember her childhood, which was sad. She knows that sorrow is dangerous, but she doesn’t know why. The narrator notes that 500 years is a lot to remember. Xan remembers flashes of a castle, scholars, and something scary. She knows there’s something that she’s supposed to remember.
In this instance, Xan is forced to understand that forgetting is dangerous—it means that she doesn’t have the tools to deal with Luna, and instead must resort to unethical behavior to get Luna to stop working magic. This makes the case that just as censorship keeps people from knowing how to most effectively move through the world, forgetting can do much the same thing—it’s a form of self-censorship, especially in this case, when Xan seems to have willfully forgotten her past.
Themes
