Winner
• Canadian Associations of Children's Librarians, Amelia Frances Howard-Gibbon Medal, 1995
• Bronze Award, Dimensional Art Director's Award Show, New York, 1995
• International Board on Books for Young People Honour List, 1996

Shortlisted for:
• Ruth Schwartz Award for Children's Literature, 1995
• Mr Christie Book Award, 1995

• 2011 Canadian Children's Book Centre TD Grade One Book Giveaway Selection!!

Quill & Quire
"In her trademark Plasticine illustrations, Barbara Reid provides the details that are missing from the brief text. She determines the sex of the grandchild (female) and creates the vistas that represent Grandma's travels, capturing the flora and fauna of each country, with its animals, birds, and historic buildings. We also are taken to sites of interior travel- Reid also shows us the two characters' bedrooms, those private places most associated with dreamy landscapes of the mind. Ethnic clothing (Grandma is a sharp dresser) and the faces of India, China, and Australia provide a wealth of multicultural details that will prolong enjoyment of the book. See the Taj Mahal! Visit Mayan ruins!

Throughout the travels, Grandma's knapsack collects more travel badges and her granddaughter grows up. Grandma's aging, too. She's in a wheelchair for her final trip, to England. In a wonderful piece of work, Grandma's feet in the chair become legs on a swing as the page turns, and the story is thus brought full circle- the granddaughter was in a swing when we first met her.

In the end, the granddaughter pushes her own child in a stroller, wearing a grown-up version of the shoes she wore on that swing long ago: They've been to the library; they're carrying travel books home in Grandma's knapsack. Grandma's legacy of get-go, vision, and love is obviously cherished and alive."

The Globe & Mail
"Gifts takes children around the world with a gambolling grandma. Barbara Reid's Plasticine bas-relief illustrations are as spirited and game as the grannie."

The Boston Book Review
"This is a deceptively simple book, both in text and art. The illustrations are done in Plastacine, which gives depth, dimension, and texture to many of the lands that Grandma visits. Reid's use of colour and form is wonderful, exciting and instructive. Each visit is a wonderful introduction to a different country and light introduction to its culture, especially appropriate for very young children. This is one of the few times when text and illustration are almost perfectly wedded, resulting in a book that, with its rhyming text, will have children asking to have it read to them over and over again."

Canadian Children's Literature
"The illustrations do more than accompany the text. They open up the world of the characters created by the text; and, they give a non-linear text its shape. The plasticine illustrations have both painterly and sculptural qualities. Indeed, they are narrative and may be read. For instance, the text does not mention time, but the art portrays its passage. It is only when we see that the child has grown to a woman with a child of her own that Gifts has a resolution. The first person narration that seems to be present time is actually memory-a grown woman is telling a story of her own childhood to her child. The woman says she will teach her child what she has learned from her grandmother: that life is a journey of. discovery, that there is adventure in the everyday world as well as the exotic, and that every experience may be translated into a poem."