When I wake up in despair about the state of the world, there’s someone I turn to for solace. It’s not my spouse, lovely though he is, but our dog Allie, a rescue lab/beagle mix from North Carolina who sleeps curled up on the bed, a furry lump of reassurance.
Allie doesn’t know it, but she belongs to a fine tradition of real and fictional canine companions who give comfort when it’s most needed. A dog doesn’t judge, doesn’t offer advice, doesn’t say “Just get over it.” For a kid faced with a life-wrenching crisis like the loss of a parent, that kind of connection can make all the difference.
It certainly does for India Opal Buloni, the 10-year-old narrator of BECAUSE OF WINN-DIXIE (Candlewick, 192 pp., $17.99, ages 9 to 12), Kate DiCamillo’s classic debut novel. Published in 2000 and now reissued for its 25th anniversary, the book still feels fresh — a wistful, healing story that’s delightful after all these years.
Dispatched to the grocery store by her preacher father one summer day, Opal finds chaos in the produce section. A large, ugly dog has sent tomatoes and onions flying and employees scrambling. A big personality from the get-go, the mutt is having the time of his life: “His tongue was hanging out and he was wagging his tail. He skidded to a stop and smiled right at me. I had never before in my life seen a dog smile, but that is what he did.” (I have only recently learned to appreciate dogs’ smiles.)
When the manager pleads for someone to call the pound, Opal hollers that the dog belongs to her: “I knew I had done something big. And maybe stupid, too. But I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t let that dog go to the pound.” She names the dog Winn-Dixie, after the store: “I figured that the dog was probably just like everybody else in the world, that he would want to get called by a name, only I didn’t know what his name was, so I just said the first thing that came into my head.”
The phrase “just like everybody else in the world” immediately puts Winn-Dixie on equal footing with the humans who populate the small town of Naomi, Fla. Winn-Dixie communicates via grins and sneezes. He suffers from what “the preacher” — as Opal calls her father — refers to as a “pathological fear” of thunderstorms. (The preacher enjoys big words.) The dog also hates to be left alone. “I could understand the way Winn-Dixie felt,” Opal says. “Getting left behind probably made his heart feel empty.”
Everybody in Naomi nurses some heartache. The preacher pines for his alcoholic wife, who packed her bags and left the family when Opal was 3. “Sometimes he reminded me of a turtle hiding inside its shell, in there thinking about things and not ever sticking his head out into the world,” Opal says. She yearns to know more about her missing mama: “Thinking about her was the same as the hole you keep on feeling with your tongue after you lose a tooth.”
Thanks to her adventures with Winn-Dixie, that agent of good-natured mayhem, Opal begins to see the gaps in other people’s lives.
The town librarian, Miss Franny Block, mourns the dead friends of her youth. Stuck-up Amanda Wilkinson grieves a younger brother who drowned the year before. Gloria Dump, an old woman some people call a witch, has learned to see with her heart as her vision fades. She’s hung a tree in her garden with empty bottles “to keep the ghosts away.” What ghosts? Opal asks. “The ghosts of all the things I done wrong,” Gloria answers.
Then there’s Otis, the pet-store manager who, like Winn-Dixie, has a touch of magic about him. Ever since a run-in with a cop for playing his guitar on the street led to a brief jail stay, he only plays inside the store after hours, for the animals, who are mesmerized by his music. “You can’t always judge people by the things they done,” Gloria tells Opal. “You got to judge them by what they are doing now.”
Winn-Dixie, like all dogs, is all about the here and now. “Dogs exist in the present,” DiCamillo notes in a new interview included in the anniversary edition. “They show us how to be joyful in the moment.”
The screenwriter and novelist Holly Goldberg Sloan — author of “Counting by 7s,” among other books for young people, “has never met a dog she didn’t find captivating,” according to her website. That feeling infuses FINDING LOST (Rocky Pond, 209 pp., $17.99, ages 9 and up), her new novel narrated by a girl who’s trying to get past a grief not unlike Opal’s.
Cordelia “Cordy” Jenkins lives in Florence, a small town on the Oregon coast, with her mother and her sweet little brother, Geno (short for Genesis). Two years and four and a half months ago, they lost their beloved dad to The Accident, when a “sneaker wave” swamped his crabbing boat. The family has had a run of bad luck since, trying to keep afloat financially and emotionally. “There are a lot of days when it’s like I’m carrying an invisible backpack filled with sand,” Cordy says.
Though she’s now petrified of the ocean, she’s still fascinated by water in all its forms — tides, the river that runs to the sea, the endless coastal precipitation. “There is a chance of rain. There is always a chance of rain,” Cordy dryly declares. Sometimes she indulges in too much exposition, which slows down the story, but she’s a keen observer, and loves the natural world: “I’m not any kind of scientist, but I pay attention to things.”
This girl needs a dog. Enter a small, scruffy stray with halitosis. (In fiction, the smellier the dog, the more lovable it is.) The family puts up LOST DOG posters, which inspire his name: “The LOST part is the biggest thing you can see on the flier and the picture Mom took is right above it.”
Cordy can relate: “I look into his eyes and I see sadness, which I know about.” Rescue works both ways. Caring for Lost begins to pull Cordy out of her grief. They go on expeditions to the river dock, a place she’s been scared to visit since The Accident but that offers glimpses of wonder — bald eagles, a dolphin-pod sighting. (One of the book’s great strengths is its loving attention to nature.)
Like Opal, Cordy finds wise friends in the town librarian and an older neighbor who teaches her to see things in a different way — literally, with the gift of an ancient Polaroid camera. When Lost needs vet care the family can’t afford, their bad luck begins to turn at last. A good dog can’t fix the world, but it can make it a little easier to bear.
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