The Last of the Moon Girls

The Last of the Moon Girls follows in the tradition of speculative fiction about generations of magical women. One of Barbara Davis’s predecessors in this subgenre is Anne Rice. Rice’s novel The Witching Hour, published in 1990, traces 13 generations of Mayfair witches. Many of these witches leave journals for the 13th witch, Rowan, to read. Rowan and the other Mayfair witches also appear in Rice’s sequels, Lasher and Taltos. They can be compared to the nine generations of Moon women in The Last of the Moon Girls—Lizzy, like Rowan, reads from journals that her ancestors wrote—though Rice’s novels about the Mayfairs are much darker than Davis’s novel about the Moon women. Rice’s work has been adapted into an AMC series.

A highly influential book that focuses on generations of magical women is Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman. It was published in 1995 and adapted into a film in 1998. There are many similarities between Hoffman’s book and The Last of the Moon Girls. Like Lizzy, Sally Owens longs to be “normal.” Due to a curse placed on the Owens women by their ancestor, all the men they love die. Similarly, Lizzy’s ancestor in The Last of the Moon Girls, Sabine, forbade Moon women to marry.