The Girl Who Drank the Moon
by Kelly Barnhill
Book Cover Picture:
Category: Fantasy
Target Age Group: Ages 8-14, Grades 4-7
Format: Hardback
Summary: Every year the Protectorate sacrifices the youngest baby to the witch to ensure their safety from her for another year. Plot twist! The witch is a good witch who doesn't kill the baby as the town suspects but adopts them out to other families in other villages. On the long journey to the other villages, the witch feeds the babies starlight to keep them sated. One year, she accidentally feeds the baby moonlight and "enmagiks" the girl. The witch chooses to raise her on her own so she can keep an eye on her magic.
Justification: The Girl Who Drank the Moon is the winner of the 2017 Newbery Medal, an Amazon Top 20 Best Book of 2016, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2016, a School Library Journal Best Book of 2016, and 2017 Booklist Youth Editors’ Choice winner.
Review: This review will examine the fantasy aspect of the book, some of the themes, and vocabulary.
This is a great introduction into the fantasy genre. There are witches, dragons, monsters and mayhem. The kids who are interested in this genre will get an easy glimpse at this fantastical motifs. There is a magic system that is not fully explained but the top down overview of magic is fun way to dip your toes into this genre. The main character, Luna, drank moonlight fed to her by a witch and becomes "enmagiked." She can create magical spells just by thinking about what she wants to happen. Kelly Barnhill did a great job making the magic fun without bogging down the reader with the details of how it worked. There were paper birds that could actually fly and boots that take the wearer great distances in one step and other easy to understand magic all around.
Spoiler alert for this paragraph! While the book has a, mostly, happy ending, there are some dark themes throughout the book. Readers and parents of young readers may benefit from a trigger warning for this novel. The book centers around the idea that there is a witch who only leaves the town alone if the youngest baby is sacrificed to her every year. This concept of infanticide can be very off putting. While we learn relatively quickly in the book there is no actual infanticide, that the witch is a good witch that saves the children, its still a very prevalent theme throughout. There is also emotional and some physical violence throughout the book. As we learn that the bad witch is actual living in down and creating sorrow to feed off of this emotional violence comes to light. It is, however, resolved by the end. While none of these dark themes would have kept me personally from allowing my child to read this book or enjoying it with her, there may be more sensitive readers who would appreciate the heads up.
The vocabulary in this novel is advanced. There were several times where I myself had to look up word definitions. While this can be a great teaching tool, and some readers will just read on through without issue, if you have a child who is easily put off by reading, especially when it comes to words that are hard to read, pronounce or understand, they may want to save this book for when they are more proficient in reading.
Overall, I enjoyed this book and would rate it 3.5 out of 5 stars.
Resources
Barnhill, K. (2016). The girl who drank the moon. Algonquin Young Readers.
No comments:
Post a Comment