The Gift by Danielle Steel: A Summary of the Story, Characters and Themes
What The Gift is about
The Gift is a 1994 novel by Danielle Steel, set in a small town in the 1950s. It opens with a teenage girl whose life changes in a single night. Maribeth Robertson is a high-school student raised in a strict Christian household. On prom night she sleeps with a star athlete who already has his future mapped out, including marriage to his popular girlfriend after graduation. Maribeth is left pregnant and alone with it.
Her father is not forgiving. He sends her away to live with nuns until the baby is born and can be placed for adoption, and makes the terms plain: she can come home once the baby is gone. The convent is meant to be a solution. For Maribeth it is frightening and lonely, and she does not stay. She buys a one-way bus ticket and goes.
What she finds at the other end is the real engine of the book. Maribeth lands in a small college town and falls into the orbit of a family who have suffered a terrible loss, the death of a child. Two kinds of grief meet. A girl who has lost her home and is carrying a baby she has been told to give away, and a family with an empty place at the table. The novel is about what passes between them.
The people at the centre
Maribeth is the character the book lives through. She is young, devout by upbringing and punished hard for one night. Steel gives her very little room to manoeuvre, which is the point. In the 1950s, a pregnant unmarried teenager had few choices that were hers to make, and the decision to get on a bus is the first real one Maribeth takes.
Her father functions as the voice of the moral code she has broken. He is not cruel in a cartoonish way. He is doing what that era expected of a respectable family, which is to make the problem disappear quietly and out of town. The boy from prom night barely has to pay anything at all, and the imbalance is deliberate.
Then there is the bereaved family. They have already been through the worst thing that can happen to parents. They are not looking for a replacement child and Maribeth is not looking for new parents, but each has something the other badly needs. The slow, careful way the connection forms is what readers remember.
The themes
Grief is the first one. Steel's reputation rests on romance, and The Gift was a noted departure from her usual territory. The central subject here is a family coming to terms with the death of a child, and the book sits with that rather than rushing past it. Loss is treated as something you carry, not something you solve.
Shame is the second. The novel is quietly angry about how the 1950s handled an unmarried pregnancy. Maribeth is sent away, hidden, and told the condition of her return is surrender of her baby. The moral failure in the book is not hers.
The third theme is the one in the title. A gift, in this novel, is not a wrapped object. It is what people give each other when they have nothing left to give: company, shelter, attention, the willingness to let someone matter. Family here is something made rather than something inherited.
Who it suits
This is a book for readers who want emotional directness. It is short, accessible and plainly written, and it does not hide what it intends to do to you. If you come to Danielle Steel for glamour, fortunes and international settings, be aware this is a smaller and sadder story. If you like fiction about bereavement, adoption and found family, it is one of her most focused novels. Readers who find stories about the death of a child hard going should know that the loss is the heart of the book, not background.
Why it still matters
The Gift was a substantial commercial success. It was a Publishers Weekly bestseller for 1994 in the United States and spent four weeks at number one on the New York Times list. That matters partly because of what the book is. A novelist with an enormous romance readership chose to write about a dead child and an abandoned pregnant teenager, and the audience followed.
It also endures because the central situation does not date as much as the 1950s detail suggests. Families still lose children. Young women are still judged more harshly than the men involved. The novel's argument, that strangers can repair each other and that the giving runs both ways, is simple and keeps finding new readers. The cover has become a recognisable piece of Steel's long shelf, a quieter design for a quieter book.
