The Girl Who Drank the Moon

Kind, gentle, elderly Xan is the good Witch in the woods. Xan has bright eyes and a big belly and “crinkly gray hair” (14) that has leaves and flowers growing out of it; “from certain angles, she looked a bit like a large, good-tempered toad” (15). As a young girl, Xan loses her family under mysterious circumstances and is taken to the castle of magicians by the Sorrow Eater. There, the magicians enmagic Xan, and the Sorrow Eater feeds off Xan’s grief. Xan tries never to think about her past or any other sorrowful memories. She learns at a young age that “sorrow is dangerous” (110), though she can’t remember why. Xan prefers to avoid conflict and unhappiness, focusing on the beauty in the world. She devotes herself to caring for others, traveling to the Free Cities and using her magic to help people. Even when she is ill and injured, she feels the need to comfort Antain. Nonjudgmental and loving, Xan “is very good at making people feel better, having had five hundred years of practice. Easing sorrow. Soothing pain. A listening ear” (301). She believes that she is rescuing and helping all the abandoned babies in the woods.

Xan strives to protect those she loves, even though this involves lying. Xan is also self-deceptive. She represses her memories and tries to convince herself that things she wants to be true, are true, like wishing Luna is just a normal girl and hoping that her magic may never appear. Because Xan loves Luna so deeply, she wishes to protect her from sorrow and never lose her. Xan willingly sacrifices her life and magic for Luna.

Glerk is “the Beast, the Bog, the Poem, the Poet, the world” (382)—which are really all the same. He is a large swamp monster with two sets of arms, seven fingers on each hand, a big squishy belly, and a long tail. Glerk has “conical ears” and “protruding eyeballs” (37), and is covered with warts and lumps. Despite his alarming appearance, Glerk is wise, caring, and big-hearted. He has lived with Xan and Fyrian for the last 500 years. Glerk loves language and shares his poems about spring and patience and love with his family. He educates Luna in language, which Glerk believes “en-nobles the rowdiest beast” (38). Glerk prefers using dialogue and reason to resolve conflicts.

Despite Glerk’s finesse with words and emotions, Luna describes him as “a swamp monster who was older than the world and who loved the world and loved the people in it but who didn’t always know the right things to say” (165). Ironically, Glerk declares that he has “excellent skills at explaining things” (238). Glerk calls himself a “maker,” and says his power is loving and creating. His spirit is “life-giving and life-sustaining” (357). Glerk is also sensitive; his sense of love for Luna and Xan is so powerful that he often feels like his heart is cracking or bursting or being squeezed. Glerk prefers truth to Xan’s well-meaning lies, though he goes along with her deceptions.

As the story progresses, Glerk realizes that he has been missing “The Bog. The world. All living things” (237). He sacrificed parts of himself to live with Xan and “can barely remember them” (237). Glerk is the Beast from the novel’s creation myth. He knows that he is “meant to be in the world” (357), and at the end of the story he returns to his beloved Bog.

Fyrian’s mother told him that he is, and will be, “a giant upon this fair earth” (35). So Fyrian, a joyful, loving, “tone-deaf” little dragon the size of a dove believes he is Simply Enormous. He thinks that Luna, Xan, and Glerk are giants, and that Fyrian must live with them to avoid causing panic among other tiny humans. Xan enables this delusion and makes Glerk go along with it. Fyrian has stayed the same size for 500 years. Glerk assumes that someday Fyrian will “grow as children do” (35). Fyrian’s mother entrusted him to Xan’s care just before she and Zosimos sacrificed their lives to seal the erupting volcano.

Fyrian has a happy, optimistic nature. He loves babies, hugs, games, everything, and has a remarkably forgiving nature. Fyrian loves his adopted family but has his own fears and hopes. He misses his mother terribly, and he “longs to see the world beyond here” (35), beyond Xan’s home. Glerk appreciates how earnest Fyrian is, though he observes Fyrian is “lacking in self-awareness” (321). Like Luna, Fyrian has been in a state of arrested development, unable to grow up. When he and Glerk travel to find Xan, Fyrian begins to change physically. He finally becomes Simply Enormous and immediately faces an adult decision—whether to kill the Sorrow Eater—and adult emotional pain, like the loss of his beloved Auntie Xan.

Antain is almost 13 at the start of the novel. He is smart, handy, and a hard worker, but his uncle, Grand Elder Gherland, dislikes Antain’s constant questions and big ideas. Antain is an Elder-in-Training, but he is not very successful. He doesn’t like the way the Elders treat the people of the Protectorate, and he prefers woodworking and carpentry to Elder tasks. Antain is kind toward people who are in a lower class than himself, like the gardeners and the kitchen staff. As a young man, Antain is shy around girls. He enjoys learning and studying. Before becoming an Elder-in-Training, Antain apprenticed with the Sisters of the Star and longed to access their library.

When he goes with the Elders to pick up Luna for the Day of Sacrifice, the experience makes him feel guilty and ashamed. As time goes on and Antain gets older, he cannot forget the image of the madwoman fighting for her child, and he cannot forgive himself for the part he played in taking the baby. He believes there must be a way for the Protectorate to defy the Witch and stop the sacrifices. The scars on his face both mark him and free him to become a successful woodworker, to marry Ethyne, and to have hope that the impossible is possible. He believes he can create change and save his child. His questions and thinking tag him as a rebel and a threat to Gherland and Sister Ignatia’s control of the Protectorate.

Antain is fiercely loving and protective of his family, much like Xan is with hers. A kind, gentle man, Antain is remorseful about hurting swallow-Xan’s wing but resolute about killing the Witch. He will do anything to protect his young family: “I am not a wicked man. I am a man who loves his family. And because I love them, I will kill the Witch…or die trying” (305).

The Head Sister of the Sisters of the Star, Sister Ignatia plays several roles over the centuries. She is the “woman with the voice like cut glass. And a heart like a tiger” (263) who brought young Xan to the castle long ago. She is the one who betrayed and abandoned the magicians, leaving them to die when the volcano erupted. She is the one who spread stories about the evil Witch in the woods. She and Gherland’s Council of Elders control the Protectorate. She is the “liar in the Tower” (250), the Sorrow Eater, and the true evil Witch.

Sister Ignatia is selfish, proud, and cruel. For most of the book, Sister Ignatia looks younger and healthier than other characters remember her, rosy-cheeked and unaging. She sadistically feeds on the sorrow of others to sate her hunger and fill an emotional void created when she hardened her heart and repressed her own sorrowful memories. She gloats about her skill and cleverness at creating the Protectorate: “An ever-filling goblet. All for her” (266-67). She lies to the people of the Protectorate and couldn’t care less about all the babies she believes are dead. She also lies to the Sisters in the Tower and even feeds off them; the Sisters eventually realize they only sleep peacefully in her absence. Sister Ignatia is frequently compared to a fierce tiger, and Luna senses that her magic is “sharp, and hard, and merciless. Like the curved edge of a blade” (355). Power and possession are everything to her. Even as she is dying, Sister Ignatia hates the joyful sounds of the Star Children reuniting with their birth families.

Luna’s mother does many things that are never done in the Protectorate, starting with breaking the rules and fighting to keep her baby. Like Luna, she is black-haired and has a birthmark shaped like a crescent moon on her forehead. Grief at losing her baby drives her mad, and for most of the novel she is called “the madwoman.” She knows that “there was a time…that she was smart. Capable. Kind. Loving and loved” (127), that she was a daughter, a “girl in love” (143), and an expectant mother. Sister Ignatia orders the other Sisters to further break the madwoman’s mind by telling her lies, telling her she never had a child, and saying she doesn’t exist (249). The madwoman loses her name, and most of her memories fly away, leaving her feeling like she lives “in a world of paper” (228). Yet the madwoman is convinced her child still lives and that she knows where. She draws maps repeatedly, but no one takes them seriously until Antain. Over the course of the book, the madwoman rejects sorrow and embraces hope, which strengthens her magical skills. She courageously follows Antain into the woods and does another impossible thing: She makes her paper birds carry her out of the Tower. Adara loves Luna unconditionally and hurries to protect her from Antain’s knife. Luna know that her mother is, “perhaps, not mad at all, but broken. And broken things can sometimes be mended” (370). Adara begins to heal under the care of Ethyne and Luna.