Because of Winn-Dixie is about a girl who has moved to a new town during the summer. It's hard to make friends when you move, and its even harder when you move when school's out. But when she adopts a stray dog, who she christens Winn-Dixie, she finds it a little easier to reach out to people. She begins to make friends with many people and realizes that other people in the town have their own sadness and need friends too.

This is a very sweet book, but it is also very simple. There are a lot of good scenes, but everything comes together at the end without any problems. While most of the characters have fairly detailed pasts and have lived in town their entire lives, they seem unaware of each other in a way that is difficult to believe for two eighty-year-old women who have always lived near each other.

This is a good book for children and a nice story, but it doesn't reach the literary standards of better books, and the way everything comes together is overly simplistic. It is a good read, but not a great book.