The Girl Who Drank the Moon introduces the reader to a world in which storytelling of all sorts reigns supreme. In the universe the novel portrays, the world itself rose up out of a story told by its creator. Meanwhile, in the town known as the Protectorate, evil agents create and promote the narrative that there’s an evil witch who lives in the forest and demands a yearly sacrifice of an infant. This story allows them to influence society, control the population, and robs their subjects of the ability to think critically about the government. Through these different stories, and specifically through the censorship attempts of the Council of Elders and the Sisters of the Star, the novel parses out the various functions of both telling and censoring stories. The Girl Who Drank the Moon suggests through this that storytelling is both the root of all power and the most effective way of maintaining the power and control that a person already has.
The Girl Who Drank the Moon shows at various points how the same story can appear very different—with different heroes, villains, and outcomes—depending on who’s telling it. It does this first by introducing the reader to the story of the Witch who lives in the forest and demands a yearly sacrifice. In reality, this witch is fictitious, while the only real witch at the beginning of the novel, Xan, isn’t evil at all. Through the contrast between the mythical witch and Xan, the real witch, the novel asks readers to engage with its different stories critically and consider the context of different purposes, intents, and storytellers, rather than accepting the narrator’s various stories as unadulterated fact. Indeed, the novel’s structure, which offers third-person narration focusing on several different characters all dealing with similar problems, encourages readers to do this as well. This enables readers to piece together a larger, more complete picture of what’s going on and what is most likely to be true, while also allowing insight into how different characters interpret information and stories incorrectly or incompletely, depending on who they are or how they get it.
While the reader is offered an omniscient view similar to the one the narrator has, individual characters within the novel are often at the mercy of intense censorship attempts and have a limited idea of what’s going on, if they have any idea at all. The Council of Elders’ promotion of the Day of Sacrifice, and the way that the Sisters of the Star hoard and protect the books contained in their library, creates a society that’s educated in the sense that young people attend school, but not a society that’s critical. Nobody learns to think for themselves; rather, students learn what the Elders want them to learn and nothing more.
Most telling in regards to the way that the Elders’ and the Sisters’ censorship creates a society run by fear, grief, and unthinking trust in the establishment are the chapters in which an unnamed parent in the Protectorate tells their child about the Witch. Though the text of the novel doesn’t actually include the child’s responses to the parent, it’s clear from the way the parent speaks that these stories are terrifying for the child. The parent threatens to send their child to the Witch if they don’t behave, and the parent also makes the case several times that there’s only one correct interpretation of the stories—proof of how intense the Elders’ grip is on the Protectorate. Later in the novel, Sister Ignatia, one of the Sisters of the Star, admits in her own words that every story about the Witch that circulates in the Protectorate is something that she started, making it clear that all the stories the parent tells are Sister Ignatia’s work. While Sister Ignatia’s confession in her narration is damning in its own right, it nevertheless speaks to the success with which she obtained and maintains control over the town via storytelling and censorship—all while creating the illusion of a free society by offering students an education and allowing “information” and rumors to circulate.
Once the novel’s action (and specifically, Sister Ignatia) moves to the forest and away from the Protectorate, the town begins to be able to see through the years and years of censorship, control, and power grabs. Notably, once the Protectorate starts to feel hopeful and begins to realize that their government is wholly corrupt (and that the only real witches in the forest want to help protect them from the erupting volcano, not steal their babies), the people have little hesitance in imprisoning the Elders, abolishing the Sisters of the Star, and opening the Sisters’ library for general use. With this, the novel suggests that the best way to thwart censorship is, first of all, to acquire the knowledge that what those enforcing censorship promote isn’t true; and then, to begin telling new, truthful stories. The final chapter of the novel is another story from the parent in which they tell their child that the witch (presumably Luna) belongs to them, protects them, and champions free speech and knowledge. This offers hope that as life in the Protectorate goes on, the stories that circulate and get passed down through generations will be truthful, positive ones that teach children to think critically, not tools meant to subdue and control everyone.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Storytelling, Censorship, and Control ThemeTracker
Storytelling, Censorship, and Control Quotes in The Girl Who Drank the Moon
They left knowing that there surely wasn’t a witch. There never had been a witch. There were only a dangerous forest and a single road and a thin grip on a life that the Elders had enjoyed for generations. The Witch—that is, the belief in her—made for a frightened people, a subdued people, a compliant people, who lived their lives in a saddened haze, the clouds of their grief numbing their senses and dampening their minds. It was terribly convenient for the Elders’ unencumbered rule.
Sometimes. I have this dream. About your brother. He would be eighteen now. No. Nineteen. I have this dream that he has dark hair and luminous skin and stars in his eyes. I dream that when he smiles, it shines for miles around. Last night I dreamed that he waited next to a tree for a girl to walk by. And he called her name, and held her hand, and his heart pounded when he kissed her.
What? No. I’m not crying. Why would I cry? Silly thing.
(“But what if they all are important, Uncle?” Antain had asked the Grand Elder once.
“They can’t possibly be. In any case, by denying access, we give our people a gift. They learn to accept their lot in life. They learn that any action is inconsequential. Their days remain, as they should be, cloudy. There is no greater gift than that. Now. Where is my Zirin tea?”)
Xan visited the Free Cities twice a year, once with Luna and once without. She did not explain to the child the purpose for her solo visit—nor did she tell her about the sad town on the other side of the forest, or of the babies left in that small clearing, presumably to die. She’d have to tell the girl eventually, of course. One day, Xan told herself. Not now. It was too sad. And Luna was too little to understand.
But he didn’t kill the Witch. The Witch killed him instead.
This is why it doesn’t pay to be brave. Bravery makes nothing, protects nothing, results in nothing. It only makes you dead. And this is why we don’t stand up to the Witch. Because even a powerful old wizard was no match for her.
Most were sent packing at the age of twelve—right when they had begun to get comfortable. Once they became aware of how much learning there was to be had in the libraries of the Tower and they became hungry for it, they were sent away.
The child was never magic, Xan started telling herself. And indeed, the more Xan told herself that it might be true, the more she was able to convince herself that it was true. And if Luna ever was magic, all that power was now neatly stoppered up and wouldn’t be a problem.
The madwoman in the Tower could not remember her own name.
She could remember no one’s name.
What was a name, anyway? You can’t hold it. You can’t smell it. You can’t rock it to sleep. You can’t whisper your love to it over and over and over again. There was once a name that she treasured above all others. But it had flown away, like a bird. And she could not coax it back.
Fyrian seemed younger and younger every day. Sometimes, it seemed to Luna that he was going backward in time while she stood still, but other times it seemed that the opposite was true: it was Fyrian who was standing still while Luna raced forward. She wondered why this was.
Dragons! Glerk would explain.
Dragons! Xan would agree. They both shrugged. Dragons, it was decided. What can one do?
Which never actually answered anything.
What if we are wrong about the Witch? What if we are wrong about the sacrifice? Antain wondered. The question itself was revolutionary. And astonishing. What would happen if we tried?
Why had the thought never occurred to him before?
Luna didn’t have very many memories that were as tenacious as this one—her memory, typically, was a slippery thing, and difficult to pin down—and so she hung on to it. This image meant something. She was sure of it.
Her grandmother, now that she thought about it, never spoke of memories. Not ever.
And the things that they did not speak of began to outweigh the things that they did. Each secret, each unspoken thing was round and hard and heavy and cold, like a stone hung around the necks of both grandmother and girl.
Their backs bent under the weight of secrets.
They say she even stole it from the moon. And then she cast a spell over all of us—a great cloud of sorrow, covering the world.
Well, of course it covers the world. That’s why the world is drab and gray. That’s why hope is only for the smallest of children. Best you learn that now.
While it was annoying to have to go hungry in one’s own home, there was always sorrow aplenty throughout the Protectorate, hanging over the town like a cloud.
Or normally there was. But this blasted hope stirred up by Antain was spreading through the town, disrupting the sorrow. Sister Ignatia felt her stomach rumble.
But the volcano never really went out. The wizard stopped it up, but it went underground. And it leaks its fury into the water pools and the mud vats and the noxious vents. It poisons the Bog. It contaminates the water. It is the reason why our children go hungry and our grandmothers wither and our crops are so often doomed to fail. It is the reason we cannot ever leave this place and there is no use trying.
Antain kneeled down. “I’m sorry,” he breathed. “I’m so, so sorry.” He scooped up the bird in his hands. It didn’t look healthy. How could it, in these cursed woods? Half the water was poisoned. The Witch. It all came back to the Witch. Curse her name forever.
A story can tell the truth, she knew, but a story can also lie. Stories can bend and twist and obfuscate. Controlling stories is power indeed. And who would benefit most from such a power? And over time, Ethyne’s eye drifted less and less toward the forest, and more toward the Tower casting its shadow over the Protectorate.
“Today the doors are opening.”
“Even to the library?” Wyn said hopefully.
“Especially the library. Knowledge is powerful, but it is a terrible power when it is hoarded and hidden. Today, knowledge is for everyone.” She hooked her arm in Wyn’s, and they hurried through the Tower, unlocking doors.
But as the clouds broke and the sky began to clear, they found themselves feeling something else, too. Something they had never felt before.
Here is the baby holding her own sweet baby. My grandchild. Here is her knowing that no one will ever take that child away.
Hope. They felt hope.
Here is the baby in his circle of friends. He is laughing. He loves his life.
Joy. They felt joy.
“I don’t know, my dear Fyrian. What I do know is that I am here with you. I do know that the gaps in our knowledge will soon be revealed and filled in, and that’s a good thing. I do know that you are my friend and that I will stay by your side through every transition and trial.”
“How do you know that name?” Sister Ignatia whispered.
“Everyone knows that name,” the madwoman said. “It was in a story. About how the Witch ate a tiger’s heart. They all whisper it. It’s wrong, of course. You don’t have a tiger’s heart. You have no heart at all.”
“There is no such story,” Sister Ignatia said. [...] “I started the stories in the Protectorate. I did. They all came from me. There is no story that I did not tell first.”
