Because of Winn-Dixie

Kate DiCamillo

4 ideas

1. A stray dog introduces a lonely girl

   Ten-year-old Opal Buloni moves with her withdrawn preacher father to Naomi, Florida, and adopts a stray that wrecks the Winn-Dixie grocery store, naming it after the store. Because the dog grins, begs, and wanders into places people keep to themselves, she meets the town's isolated people: an elderly librarian, a reclusive half-blind woman rumored to be a witch, and a pet-shop clerk with a prison record. Her father shares ten facts about her absent mother because she asks on the dog's behalf. The dog works as a social bridge: it gives a shy child a reason to approach strangers and gives them a reason to talk back.

2. The Littmus Lozenge: candy of sorrow

   Miss Franny's great-grandfather came home from the Civil War to a burned house and a dead family. He built a candy factory and made a lozenge that tastes sweet but also carries the taste of sadness, which he put into it deliberately. People who have known loss taste the sorrow and people who haven't taste only the sweet, so the candy shows who carries grief. Grief is presented as woven into ordinary pleasures, not kept apart from them.

3. Judge people by present actions, not past

   Gloria Dump keeps a 'mistake tree' hung with bottles, each standing for something wrong she did, including drinking. She tells Opal not to judge people by what they did in the past but by what they are doing now. Through this lens, the town's outcasts, such as the ex-convict Otis and the supposed witch, appear as people doing present good, not as their records.

4. Loving what you have while you have it

   When Winn-Dixie goes missing during a thunderstorm, Opal and her father search for him, and her father admits that her mother is not coming back. Opal passes on Gloria Dump's advice that you can't hold on to anything that wants to go and can only love what you have while you have it. The dog turns out to have been hiding inside Gloria's house, and the search brings Opal and her father closer.

Save and mark ideas in the app