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Chapter 3
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 chastises the child for asking too many questions about what the Witch does to the kidnapped children. They say that people can’t ask because it hurts too much. They recount how their mother believed that the Witch eats children’s souls, while their grandmother believed that the Witch keeps kids as slaves. In both cases, the parent believes that the children would’ve escaped and returned, so neither story must be true. The parent says that sometimes, they dream about their baby who was sacrificed. He’d be 18 now, and the parent had a dream that their son kissed a girl. The parent denies that they’re crying.
Because the parent often takes a brisk tone with the child, it’s telling here that they get teary at the thought of their grown son moving through life. This suggests that the grief of losing a child isn’t something that disappears, at least in the Protectorate—it’s still raw enough to make parents cry two decades later. This means that there are a number of other parents who also live with this grief, something that will inevitably drag down morale in the Protectorate and potentially lead to a change in the practice of sacrificing babies.
Themes
