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Tuesday, July 16, 2013

One Hundred Dresses


Estes, Eleanor. One Hundred Dresses.  Harcourt: Orlando, 1944.  80 pages.   ISBN-13: 978-0152052607. Available from Amazon.com for $7.99.

One Hundred Dresses, a Newbery Honor book by Eleanor Estes, was first printed in 1944.  This classic book talks about typical elementary school problems between girls but the issues then are still relevant to this day.  This book, recommended for readers in grades 3-6, can remind older readers and adults about the valuable lessons learned in elementary school.   It is illustrated by Louis Slobodkin, and the version that I read included a forward by the author’s daughter, Helena Estes. Helena explains that this book is based on part fact and part fiction, and that her mother learned a valuable lesson, which she passed on to young people for generations.
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

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