Some books present you with the best kind of difficulty: they are full to bursting with literary goodies, so rich that you can’t hope to teach the book for absolutely all it’s worth. Far from scouring the page to figure out something that will excite students and meet your instructional goals, these books require you to practice restraint–to pick out a few gems and leave the rest alone, so as not to belabor the reading.
The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill is one of those books. I recently digitized my Girl Who Drank the Moon novel study, and was reminded of how well the author used multiple perspectives to develop suspense, irony, foreshadowing, and climax.
I thought I’d do a short blog series on the book. My goal is to draw out some of the literary devices that Barnhill uses so well and provide you with a few simple ways to focus your novel study around these literary devices:
- Multiple Perspectives (Third Person Omniscient)
- Occasional Use of 2nd Person Point of View (italicized sections in the book)
- Suspense & Climax
- Foreshadowing
- Irony
- Theme
- Symbolism
- Extras (not literary devices): Emotional Aspects of Plot & Ideas for Novel Study
If you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend it! It’s a modern fantasy that feels like a fairy tale, and I can see kiddos who don’t gravitate toward fantasy enjoying it nevertheless. It’s a story of good witches and bad witches, dragons and monsters, poetry and prose, and (of course), good and evil. It makes a great novel study; the elements of suspense, symbolism and irony just beg to be examined.
I hope you’ll tune in for this short series, I’m excited to examine The Girl Who Drank the Moon once again!
