My Gift - Raluca Sirbu - ★★★

AUTHOR: Raluca Sirbu

GENRE: Children's Storybook.

PUBLICATION DATE: October 7, 2025

RATING: 3 stars.

In a Nutshell: An illustrated storybook about the power of storytelling and of dreaming. Enjoyed the thought and the moral, but the writing was way too lyrical for my reading preference. Perhaps kids (and parents) with a more poetic bent of mind might enjoy it better. The illustrations are stunning.

Plot Preview:

A young girl lives in a country filled with stories. However, when an evil king and his army of dragons invade the land, he forbids storytelling and cages all existing stories. But the little girl had three stories in her possession, and she uses these to provide hope to her people.

Honestly, I love the intent and the deeper meaning of the story. There are so many layers to it that we can interpret them the way we want. The concept establishes the link between stories and dreams, hopes, action! It shows how tales from the past can spur rebellion in the present. It establishes how megalomaniacs are afraid of stories because educated citizens can demand accountability from them based on what they learn. It highlights the immigrant experience, where stories can connect people to their native lands. Given that the author is a Romanian who has settled in the USA, it might also be a nostalgic reflection on Romania’s communist past and how courage and conviction helped the country move towards democracy. This tale also reflects much of our reality, where the powerful want more power, no matter the means and no matter the happiness, safety and security of the citizens. Happening in the USA, happening in India, and happening in so many more countries.

However, all this is the result of my introspection on the story as an adult reader. Will kids get all this (or even some of it) from the book? The writing is so lyrical that a lot of the intent is hidden between the lines. For an adult book, this style would have been fine. For a middle-grade or YA book, it might still have worked. But for a picture book, it is just too abstruse. Children might be able to make superficial sense of the story, like ‘An evil king came and captured stories, but a girl used stories to turn the people against him.’ However, this chucks out the underlying meaning.

I am not that fond of overly lyrical writing. This is the first time I have seen a picture book use such dense language, not in terms of vocabulary but in phraseology. It is beautiful, but possibly too complex at times for little readers. Thankfully, the language eases a bit as the story moves ahead.

Further, there are two characters in the story. There are no direct references to their identities, but a visual cue in the illustrations indicates that these might be mother and daughter. The mother is narrating the story to the child and the little one chimes in with some questions. The problem is that the whole book is written in the mother’s first-person perspective. So there are no cues such as ‘the mother said’ or ’the child wondered’. To add to the trouble, the child’s responses are also in first-person POV. To differentiate between the two, the narrator’s POV is kept plain while the child’s first-person is written within quotation marks (with no change in formatting or typeface). As if this wasn’t complicated enough, there are also three stories (albeit quite brief) in the book. Technically, these are stories-within-a-story because the mother is already narrating one story to her child, and these come within that narration. This is too complicated a structure for children’s books!

The target age is pegged as 5-10 years. The older kids in that segment rarely read illustrated books. The younger kids might find the content too abstract. So I guess this needs to be evaluated on an individual basis by parents/teachers/librarians to see if it can work for a child.

The illustrations complement the poetic feel of the text perfectly. Each page is like a painting with multiple depths. This book would be stunning to have in physical form to gaze upon the mesmerising artwork.

Overall, while I admire the heart of the story, the writing style wasn’t conducive to my reading preferences. The intricate structuring was also a slight turnoff. But not all kids are like me. I hope some children with a taste for the poetic and the abstract will enjoy the lyricism of this story more easily than I did.

Recommended, but not to all. Take a call based on the above details.

3 stars. (4 stars for the story; 2 stars for the structuring and writing style. Averaged.)

My thanks to the author for providing a complimentary digital review copy of “Raluca Sirbu”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.