What type of dog is Winn-Dixie?
10-year-old India Opal Buloni has just moved to the fictional small town of Naomi, Florida with her father, a preacher.
While in the Winn-Dixie supermarket, she encounters a scruffy Berger Picard that is wreaking havoc. Opal (not wanting the store manager to send the dog to the pound) claims that it is her dog and names it "Winn-Dixie". Winn-Dixie becomes friends with everyone he encounters, and so Opal makes some new friends in the process. She also rekindles her relationship with her father, and learns ten things about her mother, who abandoned them seven years ago. Opal describes the preacher as a  turtle, always sticking his head into his turtle shell, and never wanting to come out into the real world. This is most likely because of how sad he is about her mother, with whom he is still in love.
One of the people Opal meets is Miss Franny Block, a kind and somewhat eccentric elder librarian, who tells her many great stories, including one involving a bear. Opal also meets Gloria Dump, a blind recovering alcoholic with a tree in her backyard that has beer bottles hanging from it. She calls it a 'mistake tree' and the bottles represent the ghosts of all the things she has done wrong. One day, fed up with Winn-Dixie, the landlord of the Bulonis' trailer park, Mr. Alfred, orders the preacher to get rid of the dog. The preacher calls the animal pound to take Winn-Dixie away, but Opal begs her father to keep her dog. Unable to see his daughter this upset, the preacher tells the pound to return Winn-Dixie, claiming that he is not the same dog he called about.
Berger Picard