My ten-year-old self knew exactly what to do with it. The bed would make itself every morning, a new book on every shelf, and one dramatic shout of "Abracadabra!" would fix just about anything. Magic, in the imagination of a child, is probably a word of wonder that would make innocence and just being simply beautiful.
But the adult mind? It dares to dream bigger. It thinks in grander gestures, in legacy, in meaning. It asks not just what magic could do, but what it should.
Kelly Barnhill's The Girl Who Drank the Moon is one of the most breathtaking explorations of that very question: what does it truly mean to possess magic? And more intriguingly, what happens when you carry extraordinary power inside you and have absolutely no idea it is there?
The story is set against the backdrop of a community called the Protectorate, a society gripped by fear and governed by a devastating tradition. Every year, a child is offered as a sacrifice to the witch believed to live in the woods beyond the town's edge. The people give up their youngest and most innocent, convinced it is the only way to keep the darkness at bay. It is a chilling portrait of how superstition, when left unchallenged, can calcify into sacred law how a lie, told long enough and with enough authority, can shape the entire moral architecture of a society.
Here is the haunting truth at the heart of the story: the witch is real, but the threat is not.
Xan, the witch of the woods, is not a monster. She is a grandmother of sorts, kind, wandering, and full of love. Each year she finds the abandoned infant at the forest's edge and carries the child safely to welcoming families on the other side. But one year, something goes beautifully, irreversibly wrong. Instead of feeding the baby starlight as she always does, Xan accidentally feeds her moonlight, wild, potent, and overflowing with raw magic. The child, whom she names Luna, does not just receive a little magic. She is filled with it, luminous and extraordinary beyond measure.
To protect her and the world around her, Xan seals Luna's power away, binding it beneath layers of love and careful forgetting. Luna grows up enchanted, happy, curious, sheltered, with no memory of where she came from and no knowledge of the storm of magic quietly building within her.
But magic, it turns out, does not stay spellbound forever.
As we gather to explore this novel together, we will sit with some of its most profound and timely themes:
Luna's journey forces us to ask whether protection and suppression are sometimes the same thing, and what it costs a person to come into their own truth.
The Protectorate's yearly ritual is upheld not by villains alone, but by ordinary people, frightened, grieving, and convinced they have no other choice. It is an uncomfortable mirror. Superstitions do not survive on malice alone; they survive on silence, on tradition, on the unwillingness to ask why.
Does the Protectorate ever reckon with the monstrous truth of what it has willingly done each year? Does Luna find her way back to herself, her full, blazing, moonlit self?
Come ready to be moved, to be challenged, and perhaps to ask yourself, if you had magic, the grown-up kind, the kind that matters , what would you do with it? And would you even know you had it?
DATE: May 2nd
TIME: 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
LOCATION: VIRTUAL (Google Meet)
Visit the event page for the meeting link and additional details.
Amidst the enchanting atmosphere, let's gaze into our crystal ball...
Next month, we'll explore literary fiction, and here are the details of the books that will be featured in the poll.
🪁 The Kite Runner — Khaled Hosseini : In a divided Afghanistan, a young boy’s act of cowardice haunts him into adulthood. A powerful journey of betrayal, redemption, and the unbreakable bonds of friendship across decades. Heart-wrenching, lyrical, and profoundly moving.
🏜️ The Alchemist — Paulo Coelho : A shepherd boy travels across the Egyptian desert in search of a hidden treasure, only to discover that the greatest riches lie within. A philosophical fable about following your dreams and listening to your heart. Inspiring, mystical, and transformative.
☀️ Atmosphere — Taylor Jenkins Reid : Set against the high-stakes backdrop of the 1980s, two people find themselves caught in a gravity-defying romance that challenges their ambitions and their pasts. A cinematic exploration of fame, love, and the choices that define us. Vivid, nostalgic, and emotionally resonant.
🎨 Martyr! — Kaveh Akbar : Cyrus Shams is a young man obsessed with martyrs, grief, and his family’s tangled history between Iran and America. A vibrant, funny, and deeply intelligent search for meaning and a life that matters. Bold, kaleidoscopic, and unforgettable.
Four journeys of the soul. One May choice. Explore the depth of the human spirit, find your path, and prepare to be moved 📖
We're diving into Children of Blood and Bone. Here's everything you need before Saturday's discussion.
