Ratings

Content Ratings based on a 0-5 scale where
0 = no objectionable content and
5 = an excessive or disturbing level of content

Guide to Rating System

LANGUAGE

VIOLENCE

SEXUAL CONTENT

ADULT THEMES

2001 Newbery Honor Book

Ratings Explanation

Language:  Miss Franny, the librarian, describes war as “hell”.  Amanda tells her, “Hell is a cuss word.”  Miss Franny replies, “War should be a cuss word, too.”  Gloria Dump expresses herself by saying “Lord”.  The Dewberry boys call Otis “retarded”.

Adult Themes:  Opal’s mother abruptly left her and her father when Opal was only three.  Opal struggles to understand being abandoned.  When Opal asks her father to tell her about her mother, he tells her she was an alcoholic.  Gloria Dump tells Opal that she has made many mistakes in her life, some of them attributed to drinking too much.  Opal gets a job in a pet store working for Otis, who says he was in jail once.  Opal worries her father won’t like her working for a “criminal”.  (It turns out Otis went to jail for refusing to stop playing his guitar on a street corner.)

Synopsis

Young India “Opal” Buloni and her father, a preacher, move around a lot.  Their latest move is to a small town in Florida called Naomi.  Opal has no friends until she rescues a mangy mutt from a supermarket and names him Winn-Dixie.  Now everywhere Opal goes, Winn-Dixie comes along, including to church and the library.  The lovable dog attracts unlikely people who soon become friends with Opal:  Miss Franny Block, the elderly librarian, and full of good stories; Gloria Dump, an old, nearly-blind black woman that the Dewberry boys think is a witch; Otis, the shy, quiet, guitar-strumming pet store clerk; even “pinch-faced” Amanda Wilkinson, who Opal later learns is not mean, just sad because of the death of her little brother.  Opal’s relationship with her father begins to change, and he opens up to her about her mother, telling his daughter ten things about her that Opal memorizes in her head, so she will recognize her if she ever walks back into their lives.

Over the course of a muggy Florida summer, Opal’s friends teach her life lessons that transform her.  She learns from Miss Franny that in life, sometimes sweetness is mixed in with sorrow in a way that makes it endurable.  Gloria Dump shows Opal her “mistake tree”, with empty liquor bottles hanging by strings to scare away the ghosts of the things she’s done in the past.  She tells Opal that the most important lesson to learn in life is different for everyone, but that “you can’t always judge people by the things they done.  You got to judge them by what they are doing now.”  Gloria, whom Opal describes as the best adult she knows, also teaches her that “There ain’t no way you can hold on to something that wants to go. . .you can only love what you got while you got it.”  By the end of the story, Opal’s heart, which ached for so long without her mother, has begun to fill up again with the love of so many quirky and wonderful people, and she attributes it all to her faithful pooch, saying, “Just about everything that happened to me that summer happened because of Winn-Dixie.”

This is a pure gem of a book.  It resonates with sweetness and sorrow; its tale of unbiased friendship, expressed in the voice of a little girl with a hint of Southern twang, will strike a chord in every reader.  Highly recommended.

©2010 The Literate Mother