Estes, Eleanor. One Hundred Dresses. Harcourt:
Orlando, 1944. 80 pages. ISBN-13: 978-0152052607. Available from Amazon.com for $7.99.
![](http://www.theredballoon.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/100dresses.jpg)
Wanda is a young girl
from Poland; her name is hard to pronounce and she doesn’t have many
friends. She tells her classmates
that she has a hundred dresses at home.
But, she comes to school every day with the same dress on and it isn’t
new. Image is important at this
stage in life. Other girls come to
school with new dresses and they are admired. But Wanda sticks to her story even though her classmates
tease her endlessly – they wait for her to walk to school from the poor section
of the town, they follow her and ask her continuously how many dresses she has
just so they can laugh at her answer.
Wanda doesn’t have any friends.
Then one day Wanda doesn’t come to school. She is missing for a few days. The girls start to wonder where she is.
Even though Wanda is not
at school, the teacher announces that Wanda was the winner of a drawing contest
– she drew pictures of 100 dresses and they were really wonderful. We find out that Wanda’s family moved to
the big city and her dad wrote that here people all have strange names. The teacher reads the note and we
collectively wonder who has teased Wanda for her name or maybe for other
things. The students who teased Wanda
felt bad about this. Then, around
Christmas time, the class receives a note from Wanda. She is at her new school and she shares that she wants the
class to keep her drawings. Wanda
even identified certain girls who should receive certain drawings of her beautiful
dresses. The two who receive
specific drawings were the two responsible for most of the teasing done towards
Wanda. The two girls decide to
write a letter to Wanda and they can only hope that she receives it.
We never hear from Wanda
after that and we never know if she receives their letter, but Maddie, a
classmate and one of those involved with the teasing, makes a decision to not
tease people who are really not much different from her again. Maddie wishes that maybe she could have
spoken up and stood up for Wanda, but she never did. She feared being bullied and teased herself because she
didn’t have many new dresses at home either. She vows to never “stand by and say nothing again.” The story ends on a positive note and
we hope the lessons learned remain with the young girls for next time.
More about the author: Eleanor Estes wrote The Moffats in 1941, and two of these books are Newbery Honor
books. She also won the Newbery
Medal for Ginger Pye in 1952. Here is an online article on
Eleanor Estes: http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/19/obituaries/eleanor-estes-82-children-s-book-author.html
No comments:
Post a Comment