[Ad- gifted product] Robin has always been interested in reading and in magical stories! Efua’s Magic Stew is a new children’s storybook, which focuses on a young child who doesn’t want to eat dinner. Instead, she wants to play! That is, until she eats magic stew, which transports her to a new, magical place full of stories and interesting characters. Efua’s Magic Stew has a picture for every story, which are beautifully designed and bring a lot of mystery and wonder to the story.
Efua’s Magic Stew becomes the story of two twins, one of which is missing, and a kingdom that doesn’t quite understand the kingdom next to their village. One village makes up a lot of rumors about the other village, and that village’s leader gets upset by it, so tries to take it out on the people that have made up the rumors. It’s an interesting one, with Efua really transported into that world, engulfed in the story.
The story has magical animals as well, that help the main characters find the missing twin and escape from evil. They use Adinkra symbols, which are described in the story, but at the end of the book, they also have a bunch of these symbols as well as the meanings next to them, for a bit more learning to connect with the story itself. Robin found the symbols, and the birds in the book that use these symbols to communicate, to be very interesting. Especially as she had seen some of these symbols before, so knew them from her life.
Efua’s Magic Stew was a story told by the author, Angela Ackah-McIntyre to her children, as they grew up, and it does feel like the perfect bedtime story – just a bit longer than a picture book and far more engaging for ones that have grown out of the toddler stage especially, ending with the main character drifting off to bed. Robin read the entire book in one sitting, on a sunny evening on the couch, and then told me all about it, which is always a good sign!