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." This powerful,
timeless story has been reissued with a new letter from the author’s
daughter Helena Estes, and with the Caldecott artist Louis Slobodkin’s
original artwork in beautifully restored color.
