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Copywork
About This Passage
Kate DiCamillo organizes the entire premise of the book in one paragraph. Notice the tight syntactic parallelism in 'sang their song...kissed Mercy...turned off the light' — a ritualized list of nightly affection — followed by the simple, almost adult declarative 'Mercy decided something.' The shift from ritual to decision is the chapter's hinge. This is how prose can make a small interior choice feel like the beginning of a journey.
Mr. and Mrs. Watson kissed Mercy good night and turned off the light. Mercy's room became dark, very dark, and Mercy did not feel warm and buttery and toasty inside anymore. She felt afraid. One night...
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Give a concise summary, then identify the single most important sentence or moment in the chapter and explain why it matters to the book as a whole.
Discussion Questions
- Kate DiCamillo opens her entire Mercy Watson series with a SONG instead of an exposition. The Watsons sing 'brighter still is our darling one' to a pig. Eva Brann distinguished questions that test knowledge from questions that pursue real interpretive puzzles. Here is the puzzle: why begin a series with liturgy rather than narrative? What is the writer claiming by the choice of opening on what is essentially a hymn?
- The chapter quietly grants Mercy genuine interiority — she 'feels,' she 'decides.' These are verbs of human inner life applied to an animal. C. S. Lewis distinguished between sentimental anthropomorphism and what he called 'true imagination — seeing what is really there in a creature.' Which is Kate DiCamillo doing? What in the text decides between the two readings?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
a beloved one — a word whose etymology ('dearling') makes the affection explicit in the noun itself
Item 2
having the rich tactile warmth of melted butter; deployed here as a metaphor for emotional comfort
Item 3
made a deliberate act of will; the chapter's central verb, applied to an animal as a small claim about interiority
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Critical Thinking
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