Three students from Brașov won Second Prize, with a score of 148 out of 150 points, at the national stage of the CDIdei în cărți,National Festival and Competition of Culture and Civilisation, 11th edition, 2026, with a project devoted to the novel The Wild Girl.
Roxana Țuțurea, Alina Ulieru, and Anastasia Untea, ninth-grade students at the Emil Racoviță College of Natural Sciences in Brașov, were guided by their teacher, Mădălina Drăghici, from the Brașov County Centre of Excellence.
The project included a reading worksheet, a synopsis, a team journal, research into the historical background, and an original poster through which the students visually represented the novel’s two perspectives: Tavi’s world and Renți’s world.
For almost three weeks, between 17 April and 4 May 2026, the three students explored the story’s defining moments, the two children’s forced maturation, the experience of deportation, and their eventual reunion. They focused on Renți’s journal, the train journey, and life in the Bărăgan, as well as on the ways in which suffering can transform a person forever.
The poster brings these elements together in a composition built around contrast. Its darker half contains the deportation train, the hostile landscape, and Renți carrying her journal; its brighter half shows the house, the garden, and the two children bent over their notebooks. The two worlds meet within the central silhouette, suggesting the different perspectives from which the same history is told.
For Roxana Țuțurea, the book’s power lies in the mystery connecting two very different childhoods:
“It is not merely a story, but an adventure filled with unexpected turns, involving children who are forced to grow up far too soon. The mystery lies precisely in the contrast between two different childhoods, united by a silence that is not literal, but a means of survival.”
Alina Ulieru was drawn to the narrative tension and to the gradual revelation of the truth:
“It is the kind of book that makes you feel and question things, and that remains with you long after you have finished reading it.”
In Anastasia Untea’s reading, the feeling that endures beyond the characters’ ordeals is hope:
“I was left not only with the image of a harsh reality, but above all with the sense that, however complicated the world may be, people can preserve something pure within themselves.”
Mystery, transformation through suffering, and hope thus became the three paths through which the students approached the story of Tavi and Renți. In their team journal, they write that their work gradually ceased to be merely an assignment and became an experience through which they began to truly feel “the weight and beauty of the book.”
The score of 148 points out of 150 and the Second Prize awarded at the national stage recognise not only the quality of the project, but also the attentive, sensitive, and creative reading undertaken by the three students.
The CDIdei în cărți National Festival and Competition encourages students to engage with literature through research, interpretation, visual creation, and teamwork. Its 2026 edition was included on the list of national extracurricular education projects funded by the Romanian Ministry of Education and Research. More information is available on the pages dedicated to the 11th edition and the national results.
Published by Booklet in 2025, The Wild Girl is set in the summer of 1953 and evokes the deportations to the Bărăgan through the lives of two children, Tavi and Renți. Read more about the novel.
