The Girl Who Drank the Moon

Every year, the people of the Protectorate leave their youngest baby in the forest as a sacrifice to the witch they believe haunts it, certain this is the only way to keep her from destroying the whole town, when in truth the witch, Xan, is gentle and has spent years secretly carrying each abandoned baby to a loving family in a city on the far side of the forest instead of harming any of them. On one of these yearly journeys Xan makes a mistake, feeding an infant moonlight instead of starlight, and the girl, whom Xan names Luna and raises as her own, grows up enmeshed with dangerous magic she cannot control, magic Xan eventually has to seal away at real cost to herself, including a spell that makes Luna faint every time she hears the word magic spoken aloud. As Luna's thirteenth birthday approaches, several threads converge on the forest at once: Antain, a member of the Protectorate's council long troubled by the yearly sacrifice, sets out to confront the witch himself and accidentally wounds Xan in the process; Luna's birth mother, driven half mad by grief and imprisoned by the town elders for it, escapes and reveals magical power of her own; and the story's true villain turns out to be Ignatia, an ancient being who has fed on grief and manipulated the Protectorate's fear for generations to keep the sacrifices coming. When Luna's sealed magic finally breaks free at thirteen, she is strong enough to stop Ignatia for good, and Xan, her long work finished, dies peacefully once the town's collected grief finally lifts, leaving Luna to grow up openly, with her freed mother and with Antain's family, in a town no longer afraid of the forest.

Barnhill writes in a warm, storybook voice that moves between several viewpoints without ever losing its central fairy tale tone, and the book asks readers to hold multiple threads at once the way a longer fantasy novel does, even though its prose stays accessible to a middle grade audience. It suits readers who like their fantasy layered with real grief and real moral complication rather than a clean villain, and its handling of inherited fear and the stories communities tell to justify cruelty gives it more weight than a typical witch tale carries.