Books For Girls

Little girls love playing dress up! The frills, ribbons, and bows just seem to get their little hearts racing. The children’s book ‘The Hundred Dresses’ by Eleanor Estes plays right on those interests while also teaching girls a valuable lesson.
The main character, Wanda Petronski, is an immigrant from Poland. She lives in the run-down neighborhood of Boggins Heights, doesn’t have any friends, and is taunted by the girls at school because of her funny last name and clothing. Wanda wears the same shabby blue dress to school every day even though she says she has a hundred dresses in her closet at home. She goes into great detail about all the pretty colors, the silk, and the velvet that the dresses are made of. Then one day, Wanda doesn’t show up for class. No one really notices until Wanda is absent for several days and the teacher reads them a letter sent from Wanda’s father. The note said that they were moving to the city where there are plenty of people with funny last names and where no one will yell ‘Polack’ at them.
The story is told from the point of view of Maddie, one of the girls who stands by as Wanda is teased. Maddie thinks of herself as a coward and has a very hard time dealing with the guilt she has from wordlessly watching while her friends endlessly tormented Wanda. She even goes so far as to think she was the reason that Wanda moved away. In the end, the girls all find out that Wanda wasn’t exactly lying about the hundred dresses in her closet. There was an art contest at the school and Wanda had entered one hundred pictures of different dresses that she had designed all on her own. She also left each girl that had tormented her a drawing. This really shows the strength and courage that this little girl had.
This book would be a great read for any school aged child, because both the teaser and the teased would be able to relate to it in some way.