For my Jazzy Reading Journal entry this week, I have decided to pick two passages that have been unforgettable for me ever since I read them.
The first passage is:
“They left her knowing that there surely wasn’t a witch. There never had been a witch. There were only a dangerous forest and a single road and a thin grip on life that the Elders had enjoyed for generations. The Witch-- that is, the belief in her-- made for frightened people, a subdued people, a compliant people, who lived their lives in a saddened haze, the clouds of their grief numbing their senses and dampening their minds. It was terribly convenient for the Elders’ unencumbered rule” (Barnhill 12).
I haven’t been able to forget this passage ever since I read it. I find such irony in this passage because we as readers know from the beginning there is a real witch. The very first line of the novel starts off with, “Yes. There is a witch in the woods. There has always been a witch” (Barnhill 1). Already, we are told right away that yes there is indeed a witch. This makes the passage above even more ironic because something the Elder’s made up to control their people with fear actually exists and actually does take the sacrificed babies. However, we quickly learn that the witch takes the babies out of kindness and without knowledge of why they’re there. In reality, she is the one that saves them from the evil of their birthplace. Right off the bat, the so-called “evil” witch that “doesn’t exist”, is misunderstood and misrepresented. Connected to the irony, this passage also made me wonder if a long time ago the very first Elder’s really did know about a real witch in the woods, and over time it transformed into a “myth”? I’m wondering this because I think it’s quite odd how aligned something the Elders completely made up as a control tactic is actually so close to the truth. Maybe this could be something that is revealed towards the end? I don’t know… I guess we’ll find out. My last thought I want to discuss about this passage is how similar it is to real-life situations. The tactic described and used by the Elders is, unfortunately, a reality for some. Many oppressors use fear to keep the oppressed, oppressed.
The second passage is:
“And each Elder felt as sure as sure could be that the child wouldn’t live to see the morning, and that they would never hear her, never see her, never think of her again. They thought she was gone forever. They were wrong, of course” (Barnhill 13).
Not only was this passage unforgettable for me, but I think it plays an extremely important role in the novel's development. To start off, this quote tells the reader that was not the last they would be seeing of the child. It sets up the whole novel really because as we know the novel is about Luna and that passage indicates that the child is Luna and she somehow survives being left in the woods to die (because the reader would not know that Xan saves her yet). Moving on, this quote also introduces foreshadowing that indicates to the reader that something large is going to happen between the Elders and the abandoned child. This foreshadowing creates suspense and mystery that makes the reader want to know exactly what’s going to happen, really pulling them into the story. This, however, is not the only place where we see the foreshadowing of an event to happen between Luna and the Elders. Further into the book, there is a scene where Antain talks with the madwoman of their village--Luna’s mom. She tells Antain that her child is still alive and that the Elders were wrong. She then proceeds to say, “But it doesn’t matter. Because the reckoning is coming. It’s coming. It’s coming. And it is nearly here” (Barnhill 98). In this quote we see more foreshadowing of the event to come and it continues to build the initial suspense created by the above passage. Lastly, I thought the “of course” bit at the end of the quote was quite witty and funny, perhaps even hinting at the irony of the situation.
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