''The Hundred Dresses'' is a

children's book Children's literature or juvenile literature includes stories, books, magazines, and poems that are created for children. Modern children's literature is classified in two different ways: genre or the intended age of the reader. Children's ...

by Eleanor Estes, illustrated by

Louis Slobodkin Louis Slobodkin (February 19, 1903 – May 8, 1975) was an American sculptor, writer, and illustrator of numerous children's books. Life Slobodkin was born on February 19, 1903, in Albany, New York. He attended the Beaux-Arts Institute of De ...

. In the book, a Polish girl named Wanda Petronski attends a Connecticut school where the other children see her as "different" and mock her.

Plot summary

The book centers on Wanda, a poor and friendless

Polish-American Polish Americans ( pl, Polonia amerykańska) are Americans who either have total or partial Poles, Polish ancestry, or are citizens of the Republic of Poland. There are an estimated 9.15 million self-identified Polish Americans, representing abou ...

girl. Although her grades are very good, she sits in the worst seat in the classroom and does not say anything when her schoolmates tease her. One day, after Wanda's classmates laugh at her funny last name and the faded blue dress she wears to school every day, Wanda claims to own one hundred dresses, all lined up in her closet in her worn-down house. This outrageous and obvious lie becomes a game, and the group of girls in her class, headed by Maddie and Peggy, mock and corner her every day before school demanding that she describe all of her dresses for them. Her father, Jan Petronski, reveals that due to the constant

discrimination Discrimination is the act of making unjustified distinctions between people based on the groups, classes, or other categories to which they belong or are perceived to belong. People may be discriminated on the basis of race, gender, age, relig ...

directed at his family they must leave town. The teacher holds a drawing contest in which the girls are to draw dresses of their own design. Wanda enters and submits one hundred beautiful designs. Her classmates are in awe of her talent and realize that these were her hundred dresses. The students who teased her feel remorse and want her to know this, but they are not sure how. They decide to write her a kind letter and send it to her old address, hoping the post office can forward it. Unfortunately, she has already moved away and does not realize she won the contest. Nevertheless, Wanda's lovely nature and kind heart are revealed later when she tells the teacher to give the students the drawings.

Reception

It was a 1945

Newbery Honor Newbery is a surname. People *Chantelle Newbery (born 1977), Australian Olympic diver *David Newbery (born 1943), British economist *Eduardo Newbery (1878–1908), Argentine odontologist and aerostat pilot *Francis Newbery (disambiguation), seve ...

book. A 2004 study found that it was a common read-aloud book for third-graders in schools in

San Diego County, California San Diego County (), officially the County of San Diego, is a county in the southwestern corner of the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 census, the population was 3,298,634, making it California's second-most populous county and the fi ...

. Based on a 2007 online poll, the

National Education Association The National Education Association (NEA) is the largest labor union in the United States. It represents public school teachers and other support personnel, faculty and staffers at colleges and universities, retired educators, and college stude ...

listed the book as one of its "Teachers' Top 100 Books for Children."

References

External links

The Hundred Dresses at

archive.org The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hundred Dresses, The 1944 children's books 1944 American novels Newbery Honor-winning works American children's novels Novels set in elementary and primary schools Novels set in Connecticut Dresses