Family and Love Theme Analysis

The Girl Who Drank the Moon follows a sorrowful city called the Protectorate, which every year sacrifices its youngest infant to a Witch who supposedly demands the child. In reality, the story of the evil, bloodthirsty Witch is nothing more than a story designed to subdue the populace—although, unbeknownst to the Elders (the governing body in the Protectorate), there is a witch named Xan who, though she has no idea why a parent abandons a baby every year, feels that it’s a horrible crime to leave the infants for the animals. She takes these abandoned children to the Free Cities, where they grow up in adoptive families that love them. In exploring the intense and unbreakable bonds between birth parents and the children who are taken from them, as well as the loving and equally as strong relationships among members of adoptive or chosen families, The Girl Who Drank the Moon makes it clear that individuals don’t need to share blood to be family. Instead, it proposes that love, care, and positive regard are what makes a family, regardless of their official relationship status.

The very fact that the Elders use what’s effectively kidnapping to subdue the population speaks to the power of familial love, and the damage that can be done when someone or something destroys the bond between parents and their children. Everyone in the Protectorate knows someone who’s lost a baby to the sacrifice, and the entire town is damaged by the intense, collective grief that everyone experiences as a result of a child being kidnapped yearly for centuries. Even the unnamed, callous parent, who tells a child the story of the Witch and the history of the Protectorate throughout the novel, takes a reflective tone when they talk about their grief at losing a baby 18 or 19 years ago. The visceral recollection of this loss, despite the overall angry and volatile demeanor of the parent, speaks to the power of the bond between parent and child that the novel presents as fact.

While the kidnapping in the Protectorate is understandably a solemn and horrific affair, the corresponding celebration in the Free Cities where Xan takes the abandoned baby—known as Star Child Day—speaks to the power of adoption and of love to make a family, whether or not families share blood ties. Xan carefully cares for each infant as she carries them through the forest and then goes to great lengths to find them an appropriate family in the Free Cities. For the rest of those children’s lives, Xan exists as a beloved auntie or grandmother, while their adoptive parents are fully and unequivocally parents to their adoptive children. However, the novel begins to question and expand on its suggestion of what families and love can look, as mothers in the Protectorate who lost babies begin to inexplicably experience memories or visions of their children walking, falling in love, or having children of their own. Similarly, the novel focuses an entire subplot on Luna’s mother, who’s known for most of the novel as the madwoman. She instinctively knows that Luna is alive, and writes “she is here” over and over again on enchanted paper. With this, The Girl Who Drank the Moon makes it clear that while a child’s adoptive parents are absolutely their legitimate parents, this doesn’t mean that the inherent bond between birth parents and their children disappears.

Luna, the book’s protagonist, is a sacrificed child who, because Xan accidentally enmagicks her, must stay in the care of Xan, the bog monster Glerk, and their adoptive dragonling, Fyrian. Luna is the character through which the reader can see firsthand that families can take all different forms, and that the most important thing in the making of a family is that there’s love involved. Xan makes it very clear that even before Luna came on the scene, she, Glerk, and Fyrian were a family, despite the fact that none of them share blood. Technically speaking, Glerk is Xan and Fyrian’s creator—per the creation story of the novel’s world, Glerk arose from the life-giving Bog and brought the rest of the world into being through poetry. But in terms of his day-to-day family life, Glerk takes on the role of a beloved (if crotchety and put-upon) uncle, while Xan is an auntie to Fyrian and a grandmother to Luna.

At the same time as the mothers in the Protectorate begin to “remember” their children, Luna’s magic begins to erupt out of her, and Luna and her mother finally reconnect. Meeting her mother, whose real name is Adara, is a bit of an odd experience for Luna, but she comes to an important conclusion: families can always get bigger. She has enough love in her heart to love both Adara and Xan, and she goes on to help the Star Children discover that they can love both their birth and adoptive parents once the evil organizations in charge of the Protectorate are thwarted. That Luna, Xan, and Adara put their magic together to save the Protectorate, the Free Cities, and everyone else they can from the volcano’s eruption stands as proof that familial love is one of the most powerful things in the world. Because of this, going forward, growing families in the Protectorate can stay together, while the larger familial networks created by the Star Children can connect and discover that their love truly is boundless.