The Girl Who Drank the Moon

The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill is a fairy tale for 10 year olds about a town that hands over a baby every year to a witch who is nothing like the stories.

What happens

It opens with a grandmother refusing to explain. A child asks why, and is told to hush and finish supper. There has always been a witch. We have taken steps. Terrible steps. Don't make me say it.

The steps are these. Once a year the Elders of the Protectorate carry the youngest baby in town out to a ring of trees in the forest and leave it there.

This year the mother fights. She gets up into the rafters with the baby and swears she will tear their eyes out, and the Elders have her bound and taken to the Tower, because nobody has ever done that before and they have no other answer for it.

Then we meet the witch. Xan is short, round, elderly and cheerfully rude to a swamp monster. She has been collecting these babies for years and carrying them out to families beyond the forest who want them, feeding them starlight along the way. She has no idea the town thinks she is the danger.

And one year, not concentrating, she gives one of them moonlight.

What Barnhill does with that is the clever part. The Elders know quite well there is no witch. They keep the story going because a frightened town is an obedient town, and a town in mourning is too foggy to ask who owns the road.

There are two things to hold at once here. The Protectorate's people are not villains. They are sad and stuck and they genuinely believe they are saving everybody.

The writing is slow and strange and beautiful, with chapters that hop between the town, the forest and a madwoman in a tower. A child who wants one straight adventure line may take a few chapters to settle into it.

Now the caution, and it is a real one. Babies are taken from their parents and left in a wood to die, and the adults doing it have talked themselves into believing it is necessary. The mother driven mad, the father with a swollen lip and a missing tooth, a whole town quietly grieving on schedule, all of that is in the first thirty pages.

For a sensitive 10 year old that is a heavy opening. For one who can carry it, the reward is a book about how a lie repeated often enough turns into a rule.

What to read next

If they come out of it thinking about who a town decides to blame, The Ogress and the Orphans pulls the same trick with a kind giant, a missing child and a mayor everybody adores.