2017: THE GIRL WHO DRANK THE MOON by Kelly Barnhill
Yes. There is a witch in the woods. There has always been a witch.
"When I wrote this book, I didn't think anyone would like it at all. I thought it was so strange and odd. I had made my peace with that."
-Kelly Barnhill, speaking to The Washington Post
One of the higher-risk storytelling tactics in genre fiction, but one that I enjoy very much when it's done well, is something I like to call "The Big What The Hell". It's a little tricky to describe, but I'm going to try and I'm going to give you two examples.
The Big What The Hell is when a writer structures the entire plot around something deliberately bizarre and unmooring, something where the reader/viewer is left knowing that there is very obviously a missing piece of information, the absence of which is so significant that it interferes with the conventional processing of the story and makes the experience of reading/viewing one primarily of confusion for the first part of the narrative. This isn't just, like, there's a plot twist at the end. You can watch all of The Sixth Sense up to the plot twist and still process it as a story with a beginning, middle, and end and a traditional exposition, rising action, and conflict (Bruce Willis has to help this kid with this spooky affliction, and also his wife seems kind of distant), and then the plot twist enhances that story and conflict. But there are other stories where you can't process the beginning, middle, and end, because you're too busy saying "what the hell?" and the focus of the story is on the confusion, disorientation, or borderline amnesia you feel because of what you're missing. In fact, confusion and disorientation and amnesia can become major motifs throughout a story that employs The Big What The Hell.
Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro published his novel The Buried Giant in 2015. The protagonists of Giant are Axl and Beatrice, who aren't really sure who they are, what their history is, or what they're supposed to be doing. They may have had a son at some point, so they decide to start looking for him, although they're not really sure where they're going or how they would even know if they had found him. So they fumble their way through their foggy homeland and try to piece together who they are, and throughout their journey, you as the reader keep saying "what the hell?" as it's clear that there's a lot of information out there that you haven’t seen yet, and that you’re going to need before the fog clears away and everything snaps into place. Ishiguro slowly reveals that Axl and Beatrice are living in post-Arthurian England, and that Axl had once been Arthur’s right hand man, and that Arthur had engineered a massacre of Saxon villages, betraying his own people, and that nobody remembered this because Arthur had enlisted the help of the she-dragon Querig to cast a magic mist over the city and give everyone amnesia. The dragon is eventually slain and everyone’s memories eventually return, but yeah, it’s a weird story, made weirder by the fact that you are deliberately and obviously kept from understanding the full story, so that you can join Axl and Beatrice in their confusion, so you too can feel like an evil dragon is casting an amnesia spell on you. “Tony,” you may say, “what a highbrow example you just cited, from the same guy who wrote The Remains Of The Day1, do you have another, equally highbrow example?” Yes.
A major plot point of season five of the WB/UPN series Buffy The Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) focused on Dawn Summers, Buffy’s little sister, portrayed by Michelle Trachtenberg (right in the photo above)2. Dawn has always been kind of the black sheep of the Summers family, and she keeps falling into peril that Buffy has to rescue her from, that sort of thing. Except that Dawn hasn’t always been the black sheep of the Summers family, because Dawn didn’t exist before season five of the show. This was a completely new character that wasn’t in the show before, just added in, acting like she had been there the whole time, being talked about like she was always Buffy’s sister, even though everyone who had watched the show for the previous four seasons knew perfectly well that Buffy was an only child. This went on for multiple episodes, and every single character in the show was acting like Dawn had always been part of the story the entire time, even though this was a completely new person who had never been explained or introduced at any point in the show. So What The Hell?
It was Buffy The Vampire Slayer, so there was, as it turns out, also dark magic afoot. Dawn was not really Buffy’s sister, but an aetherial multi-dimensional “key” that had been put into human form and sent to Buffy for protection, with the entire timeline of Buffy’s life and her memories and the memories of everyone around her magically altered so that she would treat this new person like the sister she had(n’t) always grown up with3. It’s a weird story, made weirder by the fact that you are deliberately and obviously kept from understanding the full story, so that you can join Buffy and Dawn in their eventual confusion4.
Now guess what I kept saying throughout reading 2017 medalist The Girl Who Drank The Moon.
This is a very weird book. I really thought for a second that it was going to be a pretty conventional story about witches, and then I thought it was some sort of witchy spin on a few common YA-dystopia-ish tropes, and then it just ended up being a very strange book. And while it does seem like Barnhill is going for a The Big What The Hell in her story, I don’t think the execution, notably on the story’s pacing, is where it needs to be, and I don’t think that’s a good tactic to try and execute in a children’s novel in the first place.
The Girl Who Drank The Moon is about The Protectorate, some sort of weird village in a weird parallel world to ours, run de jure by a council of elders but run de facto by a group of cloistered Sisters. Every year, one unlucky family is forced, Shirley-Jackson-style, to give up an infant to “the witch” who lives in the woods surrounding The Protectorate, which contributes, as you’d expect, to an overall feeling of grief and gloom and despair among the village’s people. As the narrator explains, that’s the point: there’s not really a witch, the elders and Sisters just kill a child each year to keep the rest of the villagers oppressed and docile:
"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."
There are two problems here: one is that it doesn’t really make any sense how the villagers have gone along with this for so long. Multiple chapters in the book explore the viewpoints of the villagers more, with lines like "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," or "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." But the people who run the Protectorate don't appear to have any meaningful coercive power. It's not really clear, until much later in the novel, why nobody has questioned or rebelled against this at any point in the Protectorate's history, why they seem so stuck in this gloom.
The second problem with the Protectorate's fake witch ritual, of course, is that there actually is a witch, it’s just that nobody forcing the child sacrifices actually knew she was real. But yeah, there's a witch named Xan who lives in the woods and once a year goes "who keeps leaving babies in this spot" and takes them and raises them and hands them off to another family in the "Free Cities" outside of the Protectorate. Except for one little girl, Luna, whom Xan accidentally "enmagicks" and decides to raise as her own. There's also a lot of stuff about a miniature dragon and a swamp monster and a talking crow and an ancient volcano and a dead wizard and a complicated spell that keeps Luna from even understanding the concept of magic until her thirteenth birthday, but all of that is muddled and disjointed and weird, because of the thing that's been driving The Big What The Hell.
It's not until after page 200 of the novel that we learn that the head Sister of the Protectorate is a Sorrow Eater. Oh, you wanted to know what that is? It's a special kind of evil witch who gains her power by feeding on the sorrow and grief and others. That's why she's been forcing people to sacrifice their children. That's how she's been able to keep the Protectorate under her thumb. There is, once again, dark magic afoot, and the confusion and disorientation you felt for the first 200 pages of the novel was meant to mirror the confusion and disorientation that had settled, like mist, over the Protectorate (just like the mist that had settled over Ishiguro's world; you want mist, mist is kind of the main thing you want for stories like this, motif-wise).
Introducing a completely new kind of magic 200 pages into your book in order to explain things - the Sorrow Eater is a witch but a different kind of witch than the main witch - and trusting that the reader is going to stay with you for those first 200 pages anyways, is an enormous swing; Barnhill herself acknowledged that when she won the Newbery and had to give that quote at the top of this essay to the Post. And I respect her for taking such a swing, but she's ultimately writing a book primarily marketed to sixth graders, and that sort of gumption can only take you so far when you have to balance the 200-page structural risk of "everyone is blinded by grief and evil magic" against a miniature dragon used for comic relief. And if that's not a Big What The Hell, I don't know what else could be.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1960 medalist, Onion John by Joseph Krumgold.
And that other book that was basically Parts: The Clonus Horror.
For purposes of brevity, we’ll have to leave out of this essay that showrunner Joss Whedon was an unbelievable piece of shit to most of the women he worked with across all of his television shows, that actresses including Buffy’s Sarah Michelle Gellar and Charisma Carpenter have gone public with how terrible he was, and that there appears to have been an unwritten rule on the set of Buffy that nobody could allow Whedon to be alone with Trachtenberg because he was so much of a creep.
Buffy also did a smaller-scale version of this same trick in the season four episode “Superstar”, in which annoying nerd Jonathan casts a spell to make himself the hero of Buffy’s town and the entire Buffy series. The entire first half of the episode refocuses all of the action to make Jonathan the main character, complete with an altered credits sequence that makes Jonathan the star. That episode ruled.
Whedon also kind-of meant this as a commentary on larger retcons in narrative fiction, but nobody should really care what that dork thinks. To be clear, Buffy is one of my favorite television series of all time, but fuck him.