Cristina Boncea

“It’s an intuitive board game, this book – Dixit, the terror of those who can’t tolerate ambiguity, but also of those who tolerate it too much. When it’s your turn to be the Storyteller, you say a sentence to describe one of the six illustrated cards you’ve been dealt; the others have to guess which image you chose, and if nobody gets it, you lose; if everybody gets it, you lose again. Ideally, you choose a sentence that is clear, but not entirely; enigmatic, but not entirely. That’s pretty much what the sentences in Cristina’s book/card are like.” – Dan Sociu

“It’s hard for me to approach this book with a critic’s scalpel without having it morph – AI hallucinations / acid trip / cartoony Southern Gothic fever dream – into a twisted balloon sword: woven together in its mutant DNA, in a dizzying quad helix, are strands of total drama (and not just an island, since apparently there was enough budget for an entire Delululand), the black & pink braids of angsty, dark-ish novels and early-2010s Messenger IDs (which, in retrospect, have become frighteningly nostalgic), the multicoloured, sticky lint of punchy, blunt and slightly risqué one-liners (the way old-school Drăgoi used to deliver them) – and something else (an extra Rottweiler on top of the two standard-issue inner wolves). To call that something a paradoxical form of edgy fragility would be simplistic; but this irreverent / slightly unhinged self-irony also works as a fun form of radical empathy we didn’t know we needed. In short: it’s a total crack house / straight into the doll’s solar plexus.” – Florentin Popa

From the original 2025 back-cover blurb, translated from Romanian.

Critical reception

• In a 2026 review for Vatra, Andreea Pop reads Delululand as a visually intense, unconventional debut shaped by digital and pop culture, vulnerability, self-irony and a constant play of emotional extremes. She describes its poetic voice as highly individualised and radical, ultimately placing Delululand “among the remarkable debuts of recent years”.
• Delululand was also included in Octavian Plăiașu’s 2025 poetry retrospective for Observator Cultural, where he singled it out among the year’s poetry debuts and described its aesthetic as a fresh presence in contemporary Romanian poetry.