Discover storytelling techniques inspired by ‘Because of Winn-Dixie’—crafting tales with heart, simplicity, and emotional depth.
Kate DiCamillo’s 2000 children’s novel, “Because of Winn-Dixie,” is a heartwarming tale of India Opal and her dog, Winn-Dixie. This simple yet engaging story captivates young readers with its gentle emotional turns and accessible narrative.
The book’s charm lies in its conversational American dialogue and a lean cast of characters, lending a breezy quality to the storytelling. DiCamillo masterfully develops her characters through natural conversations and subtle descriptive touches.
Set against a backdrop of small-town America, the story’s beauty shines in its simplicity.
These are the techniques used to pen this simple yet adorable tale –
Imparting Lessons Through Atmosphere and Arrangement
A pivotal scene at Gloria Dump’s cottage exemplifies this: trees adorned with colorful crepe paper and candlelit paper bag lanterns transform a humble yard into a magical setting. While party planning can be daunting, “Because of Winn-Dixie” emphasizes the true essence of celebration – togetherness and joy, rather than extravagant displays.
DiCamillo skillfully anchors her narrative within four primary settings: India’s home, the church, the garden, and the library. Through these familiar spaces, she explores complex emotions with remarkable simplicity.
Symbolism
The story’s genius lies in its ability to translate abstract feelings into tangible sensory experiences, making them accessible to young readers. A prime example is the “litmus lozenge” – a candy that evokes the taste of sorrow:
The librarian shares this unique candy, created by her great-grandfather after losing his family in war. Overwhelmed by grief, he channeled his emotions into confectionery, producing a lozenge that allows each taster to experience melancholy in their own way.
This clever device serves multiple purposes:
It piques children’s curiosity about the nature of sorrow.
It introduces the concept of mindful eating, linking food with emotions.
The story demonstrates how people process and express feelings differently through the symbolic use of Litmus Lozenges – a unique candy with a bittersweet history:
The Candy’s Effect on Different Characters
When various characters taste the Litmus Lozenges, each experiences their own personal form of sorrow:
Sweetie Pie instantly recognizes the feeling of longing for a pet
Amanda is overwhelmed by grief for her drowned brother Carson
India Opal tastes the absence of her mother
Miss Franny reveals that sorrow is actually the secret ingredient, explaining how during wartime, people sought these candies specifically to help them access and release their buried grief.
The Litmus Lozenges serve as a tangible way to experience and understand abstract emotions.
They demonstrate how taste and memory can be powerfully linked.
The candy becomes a tool for characters to connect with their deeper feelings.
Opal compares missing her mom to the feeling of probing an empty space with your tongue after losing a tooth. This metaphor effectively captures the experience in a relatable way for the target age group.
Using simple comparisons to interpret complex emotions is a beautiful way to teach children empathy and identify their vulnerabilities.
The Father-Daughter Dynamic
The dynamic between India Opal and her father (known as “the preacher”) reveals another layer of processing grief:
When Opal asks about her mother, she carefully observes her father’s physical response (lowered chin, hunched shoulders)
Opal likens her father to a turtle, noting how he withdraws into himself like a turtle pulling into its shell when the topic of her mother comes up
This metaphor, seen through a child’s eyes, helps young readers understand how adults might protect themselves from emotional pain
The scene demonstrates:
How children can be perceptive to adults’ emotional cues
The way parent-child relationships can deepen through shared vulnerability
How being honest about grief, even when difficult, can strengthen family bonds.
Overall, this story is a must-read for children aged seven and up—and an engaging experience for adults. It beautifully explores the inner workings of human emotions, offering a refreshing change from the typical talking animals, folklore, or action-packed adventure tales filling bookstores today.
Years ago, my sister gifted me this book for my wedding, yet I’ve only managed to delve into its pages now.
The journey of Kristen and Rabih, the American couple, resonates deeply with my husband and me, mirroring many of our experiences.
The book’s ability to capture the nuances of a long-term partnership so accurately, at least from my perspective, suggests it might offer insights that could resonate with a broader audience.
Each reader will likely discover a counterpart within either of these characters, finding their own struggles and triumphs mirrored in the pages. This sense of universality creates a feeling of inclusion and belonging in a larger community of readers.
The first few pages can be a surprise; we don’t usually expect a love story to be in an interpretative format. However, as the story progresses, this unconventional approach reveals itself as the book’s saving grace, sparking intrigue and opening our minds to a new way of storytelling.
The true essence of a couple’s relationship emerges once the initial allure of courtship fades. The central figures, Rabih and Kristen, embody anyone embarking on a relationship journey or navigating an existing one. Author Alain de Botton intricately weaves them into the fabric of typical everyday scenarios couples encounter, exploring the underlying motivations behind their actions and behaviors. Through their trials and triumphs, he adeptly steers us towards a more profound comprehension of our relationships, advocating for empathy towards ourselves and our partners as a pathway to genuine happiness.
“Romanticism is a philosophy of intuitive argument. In real love, there is no need to articulate or spell things out tiresomely. When two people belong together, there is simply, at long last, a wonderous reciprocal feeling that both parties see the world in precisely the same way.” – Alain de Botton from ‘The Course of Love.’
Here’s a breakdown of the concept within the passage:
Intuition Over Logic: Intuitive argument values gut feelings, instincts, and emotions more than structured, logical debate. It’s about sensing and feeling the rightness of a connection rather than proving it through words.
Unspoken Understanding: In a romantic relationship characterized by intuitive argument, partners may believe they have a unique, almost magical bond that doesn’t require verbal articulation. They “just know” what the other is thinking or feeling.
Contrast with Real Love:
The author contrasts the idealized notion of love portrayed in art with “real love,” emphasizing that in genuine relationships, there isn’t a constant need to articulate or explain feelings meticulously. This understanding doesn’t stem solely from intuition but rather from a profound, mutual connection built on clear communication and shared experiences. The implication is that true relationship understanding is cultivated through active and open communication rather than relying solely on unspoken intuition.
Rethinking Marriage Expectations
Botton suggests that in the past, people aimed to settle down once they achieved financial and social stability. However, influenced by romantic notions, emotional qualities such as finding a soulmate, feeling wholly understood, and staying faithful become more significant as marriage progresses. Yet, after his bittersweet experiences and years of navigating love, Rabih believes these ideals often lead to disappointment. He argues that readiness for marriage comes when one lets go of searching for a perfect partner. Only over time, as we allow others to let us down potentially, can we truly understand them.
“The facts of life have deformed all of our nature. No one among us has come through unscathed” – Alain de Botton from ‘The Course of Love.’
Key Takeaways
Choosing a life partner hinges on accepting the challenges we are prepared to confrontrather than assuming we can evade the complexities of emotional life.
Love stories begin not with fear of rejection but with the choice to be together willingly and unreservedly, wanting to stay together
Botten emphasizes how vital communication is for building relationships. He says that good communicators are confident because they know their worth. They can express their thoughts clearly, even if their ideas are unconventional or unpopular, without doubting themselves. They believe that with patience and creativity, they can win others’ goodwill.
The author also argues that good listeners are just as critical as good speakers in the context of a marriage. Both need the confidence to handle difficult or unexpected information calmly. A skilled listener stays calm even when faced with unsettling news, showing resilience and staying balanced. They understand that disturbances pass and trust that things will settle down again.
“It’s rare to embark on an affair out of indifference to a spouse. One generally has to care a lot about a partner to bother betraying them.” – Alain de Botton from ‘The Course of Love.’
These lines suggest that it usually takes significant emotional investment in the relationship to feel motivated to betray them. In other words, betrayal often stems from caring deeply about the partner rather than not caring at all.
Emotional Homecoming –
It will be counterintuitive to think of ourselves as mad, but it helps to accept that we are all flawed and that it’s not the individuals involved in this partnership who are to be blamed; it is, in fact, the institution of marriage that is principally Impossible.
As Rabih knows now, romantic ideas are a recipe for disaster!
Rabih is ready for marriage because he’s willing to prioritize giving love rather than receiving it.
According to the book, there are three myths surrounding love –
First Myth:
The belief that desiring to be loved is more innate than loving others is a myth. In reality, this belief can be unnatural and risky because it places control in the hands of others.
Second Myth:
The idea is that our partners can fulfill roles similar to our parents. In truth, they cannot always anticipate our needs, intuitively understand our emotions, or solve every problem.
Third Myth:
The assumption is that sex will always seamlessly integrate with love. In reality, this is not always the case.
De Botton also argues that the issue lies not with life but with art.
Aesthetic representations often impose unrealistic expectations about how our love stories should unfold, influenced by love songs, poetry, and movies. This leads us to compare our relationships to these idealized standards constantly.
Instead, he suggests consuming narratives that accurately depict real-life experiences. These stories acknowledge the difficulties and challenges of love while also offering hope. They do not promise perfect understanding but normalize the struggles, helping us maintain hope and perseverance in our own journey of love.
The idea of happiness in love –
In the ‘Course of Love,’ happiness comes in tiny incremental units and will continue to come that way. You might not call yourself a happy man or woman, but it is OK to call yourself an ordinary human being passing through a small phase of contentment.
Everyday heroism –
Towards the end, the author posits that living a mediocre life offers fewer opportunities for heroism than an epic tale, yet it holds its quiet significance. Serving the family, ensuring financial stability, supporting the marriage’s survival, and fostering children’s flourishing are profound everyday heroism. This perspective underscores the value of ordinary life, highlighting that true heroism can be found in the steady and devoted fulfillment of familial duties.
“Love is a skill, not just an enthusiasm.” – Alain de Botton.
5 Timeless Lessons of Black Beauty: Why Everyone Should Read It Today
The unfailing power of empathy
The story is grounded in the reality of our co-existence as living beings and is therefore universal in its applicability. It applies to animals, humans, and the rest of the living, breathing world around us. It is a poignant portrayal of the distressed condition of the poor cart riders who develop a certain callousness and lack of empathy towards their horses and passengers, that is forced upon them by poverty and work without break.
The cruppers (looped behind a horse’s tail), the breeches (passed behind a draft animal’s haunches), the halter, the iron shoes, the bridle with blinkers, the bit that goes into the animal’s mouth, the headstall (that has the bit and the bridle), the martingale and the girth – as if these accouterments weren’t enough for the horses, they were made to carry heavy loads and unkind passengers up and down the rocky hills.
Co-existence is about friendship
The carefree colt standing under the apple tree in Birtwick with his friends, turning into a handsome well-bred horse, Black Beauty tells us this painful yet liberating story in first person. He changes many masters during his brave and formidable journey, where the only joy he experiences comes through compassion from his masters who befriend him and through his dear friend Ginger. Despite her distinct personality, Black Beauty accepts Ginger and she opens up to him, sharing the thick and thin of her journey until one day when they are separated. They do meet again on a high note when the story unfolds into showing us the depth of their unforgotten friendship. It is when Black Beauty observes his friend and is deeply saddened by seeing her condition. He prays with all his heart to liberate her from her mental and physical trauma.
Lessons of resilience
Black Beauty demonstrates incredible resilience and the ability to endure hardships. Despite facing challenges as a horse newly charged with carrying the passengers, men and women of displeasing nature, he still remains hopeful of finding a kind master and a place he can call his own and remains open to friendship, the way he experienced it in his initial training at Birtwick with his master and his mother who teaches him, how important it is to serve and treat the masters well.
Experiencing intense emotions
Through Beauty’s life, the story pulls the reader into its emotional highs and lows, experiencing intense emotions and emerging victorious and hopeful. It teaches the children that life will have creases; situations beyond our control, and while the physical pain might take its own sweet time to heal, the mental state of positivity is the ultimate bridge to cross the river. It was fascinating to see Black Beauty go through the turmoil and still stay hopeful of finding a new life, especially towards the end when he is no younger and cannot be a fine runner as earlier, on account of his leg injury. He teaches the essential lesson of what happens when we experience pain on losing someone close, or when our body and mind are at odds with each other.
Timeless power of living-breathing emotions.
The story belongs to a different era, culture, and geography than ours. It adds a perspective to our limited knowledge about the world and its intricacies beyond our reach, known only to those who breathe and experience it. From their survival, language, sartorial choices, architecture, flora, language and style of communication, the fauna, to the cuisine and the transport systems, the story set in lively historical backdrops, tells us everything in a natural and participative tone, where the reader and the storyteller blend in one equation, elope into the same background and disappear in the narrative.
The historical London we see through Beauty’s eyes is in contrast with the London we witness today with the touristy eye. The universal human emotions are not restricted by time or space or species and span through generations, connecting us with history in impossible and magical ways through timeless classics like these
Ok. First things first. Let me tell you, the short list of books here is a choice based on my authentic review. I and my children have not only read these books but loved them throughout our reading journey. There are books we have read popular enough to recommend to you, but I am not willing to list them here just for the sake of it and simply because we didn’t enjoy them!
It would be advisable to ask children after every 10 pages of the book they are reading, if they are really enjoying it. Because the idea here is to motivate them to read more, not bombard them with stories they don’t enjoy.
So here’s my list of the month –
Matilda – By Roald Dahl
Enter the courageous world of this child prodigy with no less a thrill than one can expect from a Tom Sawyer story or Chronicles of Narnia. We might think the girl hero was lucky to have the ‘parfait’ brain of a genius, but her courage..her courage was a gift with no extraordinary tag..it was simply the one we all possess naturally!
And then you love the dialogues, especially Agatha Tunchbull’s. They probably come from Roald Dahl’s real-life school experiences with his harsh headmasters as he vividly narrates in his autobiography ‘Boy’!
A story worth reading twice, for the fun it promises and for its true-to-world characters!
Age Rating – 4-6 years.
Gauri and the Talking Cow – Devdutt Pattanaik
Here’s some Indian reading from our own mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik.
‘Kali’ – is for the wild, the scary forest-like..’Gauri’ – is for the garden, safe and domestic..they are the names of the same goddess in her different ‘avatars’..
As Sweety the talking cow narrates the story of Kali to Gauri, a girl who visits her village with her father, we know we are in for an amusing, informative and interesting tale.
My son and I loved the monochrome cartoon drawing assisting the text. The best part of the story was when Sweety narrates the tales of Raja Indradyumna and Raja Nruga both teaching two different aspects of good and bad conducts.
Couldn’t fathom why in Indradyumna’s story, Gods condition his stay in heaven on finding someone on earth who still remembers his good conduct. But as the author Devdutt Patnaik tells how stories, symbols and rituals construct the subjective truth (myths) of ancient and modern cultures around the world, in order to dive deep into it and abstract its true meaning, it’s advisable to explore the multiple layers of that truth. But at least stories like these trigger the essential curiosity in children that would turn their inclination towards the cultural myths and discover the real truth behind them.
Age Rating – 6-10 years
Miss Rumphius’ by Barbara Cooney
An article published in The Atlantic, titled ‘What Would Miss Rumphius Do’ in 2017, led me to buy this picturesque storybook for my children. ‘The Lupine Lady’ has become a household name since.
The beautifully painted characters and the lupines in different shades of blue and pink spread elegantly across the landscape pages of the book, sparkle like diamonds. The fact that it is a true story makes the protagonist even more lovable.
It concocts some unique takeaways for kids – we can all make the world beautiful in our own unique style and it starts with small consistent steps
And..
It’s important to take breaks and embrace boredom – as it was during one such phase when Ms. Rumphius carves out a way to fulfilling her grandfather’s wish, which was her dream too – ‘To make the world more beautiful than it already is.’
What does she do to make her dream true?
Find out in this beautiful story of ‘Miss Rumphius’ by Barbara Cooney
Age Rating – 6 – 10
Here are some helpful resources you can help your child with post reading the story.
As a self-read, this handy 70-page book by Duckbillis the right fit for a light-hearted read during that extra time in the lunch-break or for quickly making those yawning fits disappear during class breaks.
I loved the illustrations by Shreya Sen, just the perfect support for the kids to enter into Timmy’s world.
Shals Mahajan takes children in the small but engaging world of Timmy, where she creates and befriends characters out of her own splendid imagination, who have been Indianized in a way it seems they actually reside somewhere in our surrounding. While to adults they might seem too strange and conceptually unidentifiable, surprisingly, they work too well with the kids. They quickly begin to see them with the eyes of Timmy!
My favourites – ‘Kichoo the cockroach’, playing a cameo but his dreaded long-‘mooch’-tickling is enough to compensate for the rest of his absence.
My 6-year-old, Anhad’s favourite character – ‘Idli Amma’ as she too loves Idlis like him and feeds on story food!
And how about ‘hanging’ a book by the bedside? I do that with the signature hole in the corner of these duckbill books!
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
No.. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept, answered the skin horse.
******
Can the concept of love be more beautifully interposed with children than this? This story of love spoken from the perspective of a toy velvet rabbit blurs out the world outside and spotlights the two characters of the rabbit being loved so whole-heartedly in the most passionate, purest form of love that it comes to life – from the toy world to human, and the distant but familiar character of the young boy who loves his toy rabbit unconditionally!
The rabbit waits for the day when the boy chooses him as his playmate and wants to be a REAL rabbit to be able to LIVE with the boy he loves forever.
It intrigues children to think philosophically about what is ‘real’ – a physical form, being loved enough that makes us real, or being present in flesh and blood.
And then it answers very subtly – that a physical form is not being real, being in flesh and blood isn’t reality alone but being LOVED ENOUGH is!
What makes you real?
The capacity to love and be loved enough!
*****
While this is a personal round-up of books to read with your child this June, there are lots to explore from the Indian English and Hindi books as well.
Having a clearly defined literary voice can have a timeless appeal. In a piece of fiction, voice can mean –
Author’s voice,
Character’s voice and
Narrator’s voice.
The Narrator’s voice –
The narrator is the ‘all-seeing eye’ of a story. In a case where there can be no specific attribute or name given to the narrator (Hills like White Elephants by Earnest Hemmingway), it can still have that omniscient point-of-view or POV, which can access characters’ feelings and thoughts and knows where the story is taking the reader. The narrator’s voice is the voice of the character or personality narrating the story. This voice can be different from the author’s voice, unless the author is narrating the story herself, like in case of personal essays, where she would consciously try to reveal her style of writing to the reader and would like to adopt an honest, natural tone to stay as close to her own personality as possible. While doing this, she would also understand how this style of writing relates to her audience.
So, narrator’s voice is the voice of the person telling the story. Just like in a Radio drama, we are able to tell the character’s voice from the narrator’s voice, while reading fiction, we can discern the same. We can tell one voice from the other. The narrator will have his own set of diction, mood and style of telling the story and can take a particular POV (Point of View.), different from the Author’s.
Character’s voice –
A story can have multiple character voices. A character’s voice tells us about their personality, disposition (characteristic attitude) and background. In a story every character has their own way of expression. He may sound casual or cautious, terse or verbose, traits revealed by the way they use words and react in a dialogue or scene.
The precise elements that may be studied to understand a character’s voice are their –
Tone
Diction
Dialect
Level of introversion or extroversion
These elements may also reveal their age, nationality or life experiences.
For example, in E.B. White’s Charollete’s Web, Charollete, the female spider is like an old teacher with a caring and selfless demeanor when she speaks to Wilbur, the pig. She speaks with clarity and there’s an inspirational slant in her language.
“These autumn days will shorten and grow cold. The leaves will shake loose from the trees and fall. Christmas will come, then the snows of winter. You will live to enjoy the beauty of the frozen world, for you mean a great deal to Zuckerman and he will not harm you, ever. Winter will pass, the days will lengthen, the ice will melt in the pasture pond. The song sparrow will return and sing, the frogs will awake, the warm wind will blow again. All these sights and sounds and smells will be yours to enjoy, Wilbur — this lovely world, these precious days…”
Charollete, from Charollete’s Web.
Wilbur, on the other hand is diffident and low in self-esteem.
“But Charlotte,” said Wilbur, “I’m not terrific.” – Wilbur (when Charollete decides to spin the word ‘Terrific’ through her web, for the him.)
Author’s Voice
The author’s voice is her personality coming through on the page. It includes everything from her tone (attitude towards a problem), her word choice or diction, punctuation and sentence structure. Her thoughts, part of her voice, are also conveyed through the voices of her characters and their background like age, nationality etc.
An example of voice could be the long, crafty sentences of Dickens or, cut to the chase sentences (without much use of adverbs) of Hemmingway.
An author’s voice is also determined by –
Mood
Or worldview
Point of View
Voice of the following authors transcends their individual work –
Earnest Hemmingway
Toni Morrison
James Joyce
Joyce Oates
Margret Atwood
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Meaning of the worldview –
Every author has a picture they paint of the world. There’s a certain way they think about the world according to their own values, experiences and learnings. A worldview or perspective, is what an author thinks about worldly topics like – love, family, terrorism etc. and this can be narrated through the characters in fiction and through first or second person point of view in case of Non-fiction.
For example, if I am standing facing the façade of a large building and if I were to tell somebody how the building looks, I would give the description of the facade. It’s like seeing something from one angle and only talking about that angle in detail. Like talking from a young man’s perspective, the story might take us into different action-oriented scenes, making us feel that life is really adventurous, and from an old man’s perspective it might be more observational and analytical.
