A ten-year-old girl moves to a small Florida town with her father and knows nobody. She goes to the grocery store, comes home with a large, ugly, grinning stray dog, and names him after the store. The dog then walks her into friendships with everyone in town nobody else bothers with.
Why it earns read-aloud time
There is a chapter about a candy called a Littmus Lozenge. It is sweet, and then, underneath, it tastes like sadness. Different characters eat one and taste something different, and the girl works out that the recipe has sorrow in it.
I have watched that idea do more for a child's ability to name what they feel than a whole year of grown-ups asking how they are doing. It hands a kid a concrete object for something abstract, and children take that and keep it.
The rest of the book is quiet and first person and very plain, which is easy to read out loud. Opal talks the way a ten-year-old actually talks. There is no adult voice sneaking in over the top of her.
The child it lands with
The new kid. The lonely one. The one who has just moved, or lost a friend group, or is the only child their age for six miles, which in our part of the world is most of them.
And the one who wants a dog and is not getting one. This is the closest thing to having one.
One place to stop and talk
The Littmus Lozenge, obviously. After that chapter, ask your child what their sadness would taste like if you could put it in a candy.
Do not push it. Some kids answer immediately and some go quiet and answer three days later in the car. Both are the right answer.
What to know going in
Opal's mother left. That is the wound the whole book sits on, and it is never fully healed by the end. Opal lists ten things her father tells her about her mother and carries that list around like a map.
If your child has an absent parent, or a parent who left, this book will land directly on it. That can be exactly right and it can be too soon. You know which. Read the first two chapters yourself before you decide.
There is also a character with a past involving alcohol who talks about it honestly with a child, and a father who preaches for a living and is written as a person rather than as a message. Neither is preachy, but this is a small Southern town, faith sits in the background of the setting the way weather does, and it will come up in passing.
Where to get it
It is on our shelf at Because of Winn-Dixie, on the Third-Grade Read-Alouds shelf. It is also on the full list of ten.
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