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Dog-Eared Reads: Because of Winn-Dixie

By Wesley Coburn

TAMWORTH, AUSTRALIA - JANUARY 23: The guide dog float makes its way along Peel Street during the Tamworth Country Music Festival Calvacade on January 23, 2016 in Tamworth, Australia. The Tamworth Country Music Festival is a 10 day event showcasing over 700 artists and draws large crowds enjoying the annual Australia Day weekend, culminating in the Golden Guitar Awards which celebrates the best of Australian country music. (Photo by Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images)
TAMWORTH, AUSTRALIA - JANUARY 23: The guide dog float makes its way along Peel Street during the Tamworth Country Music Festival Calvacade on January 23, 2016 in Tamworth, Australia. The Tamworth Country Music Festival is a 10 day event showcasing over 700 artists and draws large crowds enjoying the annual Australia Day weekend, culminating in the Golden Guitar Awards which celebrates the best of Australian country music. (Photo by Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images) /
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Kate DiCamillo’s Because of Winn-Dixie is a good middle-grade novel introduction to the richness of Southern literature.

Kate DiCamillo’s Because of Winn-Dixie isn’t really a dog book. (But then, what exactly defines a “dog book”? Probably a topic for another post.) It’s more about its narrator coming to grips with this unfair, often mean-for-no-reason world.

This children’s novel was published in 2000, and I would estimate its age-range target around third to fifth grade.

Ten-year-old Opal Buloni and her pastor father (simply called “the Preacher”) just moved to Naomi, Florida, from a different part of the state, and moving to a new town can be rough. But when she adopts a stray mutt raiding the grocery store (who smells bad and looks like “a piece of old brown carpet left out in the rain”), things begin to turn around.

Opal and Winn-Dixie make friends with the guitar-playing pet shop manager Otis, elderly librarian Miss Franny Block and nearly-blind alcoholic Gloria Dump, and as the summer goes on they each help Opal realize that while her mother might not be in her life (she left the Preacher seven years ago), things still can be okay.

Winn-Dixie’s presence and doggy affection bring Opal and the Preacher’s strained relationship a little closer, and Opal gradually becomes friends with the other kids from their church.

Opal can be a little naive, as her narration shows, and the dialogue can feel a little forced at times, but in general Winn-Dixie serves as a good introduction to the pantheon of Southern literature (which ranges from William Faulkner, Margaret Mitchell and Zora Neale Hurston to Flannery O’Connor, Harper Lee and Jan Karon).

An important theme in the story is sorrow, as nearly every character is broken in some way from bitterness or a separation of some type – Miss Franny’s loneliness of missing her peers due to her age, the Preacher trying to fix the lives of his congregation as a way to forget his own problems, or Gloria’s laments about whatever misdeeds were wreaked in her past, represented by her “Bottle Tree.”

Sorrow is an essential thing to grasp as part of life, and it is an especially important concept to include in a dog story, simply because if we love a dog, at some point that dog will die before we’re ready. Perhaps this is why so many classic dog stories are tragedies, because they stick in our minds better. It’s why Oedpus Rex, Romeo and Juliet and Spider-Man’s origin are so engrained in our culture.

dark. Next. Florida artist makes great dog art

Because of Winn-Dixie was made into a 2005 film starring AnnaSophia Robb, Jeff Daniels, Eva Marie Saint, Dave Matthews and Elle Fanning.

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