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A bittersweet tale
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According to Miss Franny Block, the town librarian in Naomi, Florida, her great-grandfather made his fortune after the Civil War by manufacturing a candy "that tasted sweet and sad at the same time". Ten-year-old India Opal Buloni (called Opal) thinks this description of the candy sounds a lot like life, where "the sweet and the sad are all mixed up together" too.
Opal and her preacher father have moved to Naomi for her father's new job. Here, on an errand to the local grocery store, Opal acquires a unique friend, a large, ugly but happy stray dog who "looks like a big piece of old brown carpet that has been left out in the rain". Opal names it "Winn-Dixie".
Winn-Dixie proves to have exquisite taste in people and is better at making friends than anyone Opal has ever known. Together they meet the local librarian, Miss Franny Block, who once fought off a bear with a copy of War and Peace. They meet Gloria Dump, who is nearly blind but sees with her heart, and Otis, an ex-con pet-store clerk who plays sweet music to his animals.
Because of Winn-Dixie, the preacher tells Opal 10 things about her absent mother, one for each year Opal has been alive. Because of Winn-Dixie, Opal makes new friends among the somewhat unusual residents of her new hometown. Because of Winn-Dixie, Opal begins to find her place in the world and let go of some of the sadness left by her mother's abandonment seven years earlier.
Children's literature is often full of animal-to-the-rescue stories, but rarely does salvation come in the form of a creature with as much personality as Winn-Dixie.
Each chapter reads almost like a short story in its completeness, yet the chapters add up to more than the sum of their parts. Opal will win readers over just as quickly as Winn-Dixie wins her over.
This novel joins the long tradition of exploring a small southern town's eccentric characters. The bittersweet tale of contemporary life in a small town will hold readers rapt (着迷的).
About the author
Kate DiCamillo, who now makes her home in Minneapolis, lived in the South for much of her childhood and received her bachelor's degree from the University of Florida in Gainesville. She is a recipient of the 1998 McKnight Artist Fellowship for Writers. Because of Winn-Dixie, which she calls "a hymn (赞歌) of praise to dogs, friendship and the South", is Kate DiCamillo's first novel.
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