Belinda and the Dustbunnys

Sarah Treleaven is a Toronto-based freelance writer and reviewer.

Twelve-year-old Belinda was abducted from her family as a baby and is
now consigned to a bare attic room, with no companionship and little
more to eat than mouldy crusts of bread. Her caretaker, Nanny Gulch, is
a hideous woman with nothing but hatred in her heart, and she lives with
two married ogres named Theodora and Cedric Dustbunny. Every day,
Belinda passes the time by imagining that she is somewhere else, and she
eventually develops her mental focus enough that she can physically
transport herself beyond the walls of her attic prison.

Madeline Sonik’s story is touted as a gothic-comic thriller and is
ambitiously likened to the works of both Roald Dahl and J.K. Rowling.
While Sonik lacks the immense, seemingly effortless charms of Dahl and
Rowling, she certainly knows how to tell a story in an interesting
fashion. Her use of similes is quite pleasing, especially when she
describes Nanny Gulch’s appearance to be “as threadbare and old as a
worn out walking shoe.”

The suggested readership for the book is seven- to nine-year-olds, but
the text is certainly too dark for children so young. Sonik explores the
mindset of child kidnappers and even ventures into Gulch’s suicidal
tendencies. The violence in Belinda and the Dustbunnys does not have the
same wholly fantastical qualities captured by Dahl and Rowling, and
often reads as more cruel than amusing. Not a first-choice purchase.