DiCamillo is thrilled that people are still loving what turned out to be the first of dozens of books she has created \u2014 and, like all of her titles, she is reluctant to take much credit for it.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I always think of when I think of this book is, it\u2019s almost a joke that everything that happened to me, happened to me because of \u2018Winn-Dixie.\u2019 But that\u2019s the case,\u201d said DiCamillo, drawing a line between her life and the life of Opal. \u201cThis book, in my head, is not mine but has acted as what I genuinely feel like is a golden doorway that I got to walk through to do this work. Because of how people responded to the book, it let me become a storyteller.\u201d<\/p>\n
DiCamillo says that\u2019s \u201ca wonderful gift\u201d and one message of the book is that dogs are gifts to us all. The titular pooch in \u201cWinn-Dixie\u201d reminded Petersen of a dog he used to have, named Abby. That human\/dog connection is an important one for other lovers of the book such as Weber, who\u2019s currently reading it with her grandkids and seeing it through their eyes.<\/p>\n
\u201cI love how the main character talks to the reader, as if they\u2019re peers, talking about her experiences. I love Winn-Dixie and the descriptions of his smile, his toothy grin, his personality,\u201d said Weber, who\u2019s a dog lover. \u201cYou can see that personality and how he has a way of wheedling in and using that personality, getting into people\u2019s hearts.\u201d<\/p>\n
Although she has read the book many times, Weber will be seeing the movie for the first time Tuesday. One person who won\u2019t be able to make the screening is 10-year-old Arielle Brown, who lives in New York. She first read the book a little more than two years ago, not realizing it was by the same writer as her beloved \u201cMercy Watson\u201d<\/a> books.<\/p>\n Arielle started out with library books but now has a DiCamillo collection because she re-reads them so often \u2014 mostly because, as her mom, Caron Brown, said, DiCamillo is \u201cso descriptive in her writing that it enables her to visualize what appears to be happening.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DiCamillo is thrilled that people are still loving what turned out to be the first of dozens of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":84654,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-84653","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84653\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}