Amanda Wilkinson

Amanda's pinched expression reflects hidden grief over the drowning death of her younger brother Carson, not snobbery or unfriendliness. DiCamillo introduces it as a detail Opal — and the reader — initially misreads as superiority. Once Opal learns about Carson, the expression is reframed entirely: it is the face of a child working very hard to hold sorrow inside and keep the ordinary world at a distance.

Carson, Amanda's younger brother, drowned the year before the novel's events. His death is the defining fact of Amanda's emotional life, explaining her guarded manner, her retreat into books, and the tight, closed-off expression Opal notices when they first meet at the Naomi Public Library. DiCamillo withholds this information until well into the novel so that readers experience the same moment of empathetic revelation that Opal does.

Their relationship moves from misunderstanding to the threshold of genuine friendship. Opal initially reads Amanda as cold and stuck-up, but after piecing together the truth about Carson's death — sparked by Miss Franny Block's story of the Littmus Lozenge — she feels real empathy for her. By the novel's end, with Amanda appearing at Gloria Dump's party, the two girls stand cautiously but meaningfully closer to each other.

Miss Franny is an indirect but crucial bridge between Amanda and Opal. The library is Amanda's chosen sanctuary, and it is within Miss Franny's storytelling space — specifically through the tale of Littmus W. Block and the sorrow-flavored Littmus Lozenge — that Opal gains the insight needed to understand Amanda's grief. Miss Franny never deliberately reveals Carson's death; the emotional atmosphere her stories create makes the revelation possible.

Amanda's book-hoarding is an act of emotional self-preservation, not possessiveness. Books provide the only container large enough to hold a grief she cannot speak aloud after Carson's drowning. DiCamillo draws a deliberate parallel here: books function for Amanda much the way Winn-Dixie functions for Opal — as a buffer between a devastating absence and a world that keeps expecting her to be fine.

Her attendance signals a tentative willingness to step out of isolation and accept community. The party occurs during a violent storm, making her choice to show up — or stay — an act of quiet courage in the novel's emotional logic. Gloria Dump herself represents the idea that grief need not isolate a person forever, and Amanda's presence there suggests she is beginning to receive that message.

Amanda is not a villain, though DiCamillo deliberately misleads readers into seeing her as a minor antagonist early on. Her cool demeanor and superior air make her seem like a social obstacle for Opal in Naomi. The novel ultimately reveals her as a fellow mourner whose guarded behavior is a symptom of loss, making her the story's most important test case for the theme that empathy requires looking past surface appearances.

The two girls represent opposite ends of the emotional spectrum among the children in Opal's circle. Sweetie Pie is open, exuberant, and socially porous, while Amanda is sealed shut by grief. DiCamillo places them in the same peer group to illustrate that children process loss and hardship in radically different ways, and that neither response — extroverted warmth or introverted self-protection — is simply wrong.