Dustbin Baby

Dustbin Baby by Jacqueline Wilson is a story for 11 year olds about a girl who was found in a bin the day she was born and cannot stop wondering who left her there.

What happens

It opens with April sitting somewhere warm, shaking too much to drink her water, waiting for someone she has never met. She calls this the happy ending. Then chapter one starts, and you spend the book working out how she gets from here to there.

Here is her fourteenth birthday. She hates her birthday. It falls on April Fool's Day, which she thinks is a pretty sick joke.

The morning goes wrong immediately. Marion, who fosters her, brings breakfast in bed and a present in a box inside a box inside a box. April is certain it is a mobile phone. It is earrings.

The row that follows is the kind that gets away from you. April says the thing you can never take back. It's not like you're my mother.

What makes it hurt is that she knows. She tells you she didn't mean it and then tells you she did, in the very next line. She wants to stop being horrible to Marion and she cannot manage it.

That's what being in April's head is like. She tells you everything she is too ashamed to say out loud.

She copies her friends, too. Same books as Cathy. Same hair and the same beads as Hannah. Both of them noticed. She is terrified they will find out about her and go off her. If you've got a reader who has ever worked very hard at looking normal, that bit will land.

This one is worth knowing about before you hand it over. The abandonment is not softened at all, and April describes it herself, right down to the pizza box she was lying on. She has been through children's homes and more than one foster placement. She buys a newspaper on her birthday every year in case her mother has left a message in the personal column. There never is one.

There is also a long stretch where April imagines her mother's side of it. She pictures a frightened schoolgirl at a party, a boy who keeps going after she says please don't, and then a birth on her own with nobody to help her. It isn't graphic. It is very clearly about sex the girl didn't want, and it goes on for several pages.

So this is not one for a child who finds being unwanted hard to read about. If your reader already loves Jacqueline Wilson and manages the sad ones, April is excellent company. She can be very funny about Marion even while she is breaking her heart.

What to read next

If your reader wants another girl in care telling her own story, The Story of Tracy Beaker is in the library too. Tracy is younger and a great deal louder, and she is absolutely certain her mum is coming back for her.