The Girl Who Drank the Moon

This is it. This is where I stop.

I don’t think this book is badly written; just sloppily written. It starts well, with a baby delivered to a witch in the woods as an offering to protect a town, and the witch who actually raises those babies instead of leaving them to be eaten by animals. The characters are well-drawn, from the witch and her friends and the baby she rescues, to the grim town elders who perpetuate the myth of a necessary sacrifice to maintain their hold on power.

But then, roughly one third of the way in the pace sags and instead of things happening, the characters begin to talk about what’s happening. The last two thirds of the book are chock full of endless conversations in which everyone starts telling everyone else what the reader already knows.

One example. The witch who rescued baby Luna puts a spell on her to stifle the magic in her. It will last until Luna is old enough to understand the powers she’s been bequeathed. However, when Luna reaches that age, she spends whole chapters trying to work out what’s going inside her head. Since we, the readers, already know what’s going on, reading endless descriptions of her struggles with herself becomes not just frustrating but boring.

And it happens over and over all the way to the end: what the reader already knows is discussed and described and pondered and described again ad infinitum by the characters themselves. Instead of showing us what’s happening, Kelly Barnhill has them tell us what’s happening. So much so when we finally reach the grand climax... it’s all over in a page. Instead of vivid pictures painted with words, all we get is dialogue. Page after page after page of dialogue, all of which resemble nothing so much as a lightly polished first draft hacked out by a writer meeting a daily word quota.

By the time I finished the book, I had two questions. One: how did an editor let such a loose and baggy piece of writing pass? Two: how did it ever win the Newbery Medal in 2017? And three: how did it make it to the New York Times bestseller lists and at least 14 printings in the UK?

Okay, that’s three questions. But I’m more than a little miffed and The Girl Who Drank the Moon really does mark the point where I stop. From now on I will never again buy any book that comes crammed with quotes praising it to the skies unless a friend I trust recommends it.

And even then I’ll hesitate.