Estes, Eleanor "The Hundred Dresses" - 1944
A beautiful children's book that I found while helping out at a school book sale. A novel that teaches children about bullying, about poverty, about friendship and acceptance. The story is set in the 1940s but it might as well have been written today, it's a timeless classic that will still be true in a hundred years. This is a book, everyone should read, children and adults alike.
From the back cover:
"Eleanor Estes’s The Hundred Dresses won a Newbery Honor in 1945 and has never been out of print since. At the heart of the story is Wanda Petronski, a Polish girl in a Connecticut school who is ridiculed by her classmates for wearing the same faded blue dress every day. Wanda claims she has one hundred dresses at home, but everyone knows she doesn’t and bullies her mercilessly. The class feels terrible when Wanda is pulled out of the school, but by that time it’s too late for apologies. Maddie, one of Wanda’s classmates, ultimately decides that she is 'never going to stand by and say nothing again.'"
Sometimes childrens' literature has some of the most wonderful stories hidden in a seemingly simple genre. None more so that Wilde's fairytales, but now I want to read The Hundred Dresses.
ReplyDeleteOh Marianne, you would absolutely love it. As I mentioned, I found it at a school book sale. With two boys, I would never have come across it in their reading bags.
ReplyDelete