Kate DiCamillo
Kate DiCamillo has won two Newbery Medals, for The Tale of Despereaux and Flora & Ulysses, which puts her in a group of seven authors and settles most arguments about the ceiling on children's fiction. More than twenty-five novels, around thirty-seven million copies sold, four adapted into films.
What she does that few others in the field manage is write about loneliness without flinching and without letting it swallow the book. Because of Winn-Dixie is a girl, a stray dog and a mother who left. The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane is a china rabbit passed through the hands of people who need him rather more than he needs anyone. The Tiger Rising sits on grief and declines to resolve it early. The sentences are short and plain and read aloud beautifully, which is deliberate, and the emotional weight arrives with no explanation attached to it.
Her comic register gets underrated. The Mercy Watson books, about a pig with an unmanageable appetite for buttered toast, are early-reader farce with genuinely good timing, and the Deckawoo Drive spin-offs around them are funnier than they need to be. She appears in the 2021 film of Flora & Ulysses as a character called Kate.
Movies (1)
Books (36)
- Because of Winn-Dixie (2000)
- The Tale of Despereaux (2003)
- The Tiger Rising (2001)
- Mercy Watson, Something Wonky This Way Comes (2009)
- Flora & Ulysses (2013)
- The Magician's Elephant (2001)
- Bink and Gollie (2010)
- Mercy Watson goes for a ride (2006)
- Raymie Nightingale (2016)
- Mercy Watson Thinks Like a Pig (Mercy Watson) (2008)
- Great Joy (2007)
- Mercy Watson Is Missing! (2023)
- Franklin Endicott and the Third Key (2021)
- The Beatryce Prophecy (2021)
- Stella Endicott and the Anything-Is-Possible Poem (2020)
- Beverly, right here (2019)
- Louisiana's way home (2018)
- Eugenia Lincoln and the unexpected package (2017)
- Where Are You Going, Baby Lincoln? (2016)
- Bink and Gollie: Best Friends Forever (2013)
- Mercy Watson (2007)
- Mercy Watson fights crime (2006)
- Lost Evangeline (2025)
- Ferris (2024)
- Hotel Balzaar (2024)
- Puppets of Spelhorst (2023)
- Very Mercy Christmas (2022)
- A Piglet Named Mercy (2019)
- Good Rosie! (2018)
- La La La: A Story of Hope (2017)
Where to start with Kate DiCamillo
Because of Winn-Dixie is the easiest of hers to hand to someone else, so begin there. A summer, a stray dog, and a town of adults lonelier than the child narrator realises, told so lightly that the grief underneath only registers afterwards.
If that lands, go to The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, her hardest book emotionally and her best sentence by sentence, then The Tale of Despereaux for the Newbery-winning fable with a mouse, a rat, some soup and a narrator who addresses you directly. The Tiger Rising is the shortest and the bleakest, so save it.
For younger or more reluctant readers, start at Mercy Watson to the rescue and continue through Mercy Watson goes for a ride and Mercy Watson fights crime, which are pure comedy about a pig and hot buttered toast. Raymie Nightingale suits a reader ready to move up, and Flora & Ulysses is the other Newbery winner, with a squirrel, a poetry habit and a comic-book sensibility.
The novels
The books that made her name, including both Newbery winners. Because of Winn-Dixie is the gentlest place to start and Edward Tulane is the one that reliably makes adults cry on public transport.
The Mercy Watson books
Early-reader chapter books about a pig who lives indoors and is motivated almost entirely by buttered toast. They are far funnier than that summary suggests and are frequently the first books a child finishes alone.
The Deckawoo Drive spin-offs
Each of Mercy Watson's neighbours gets a book of their own, which turns a joke about a pig into a small interconnected world. Baby Lincoln's is the best of them and quietly the saddest.
The later novels
The Raymie Nightingale trilogy follows three girls across three separate books, one each, and the recent work has moved toward fable. Ferris is the most recent and among the warmest things she has written.