Overview / 简介: |
| 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 in paperback 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. |
From Organization / 国外机构评价: |
| Grade 3-6-Friendship, peer pressure, regret, and courage are all issues that are integral to this Newbery Honor book by Eleanor Estes (Harcourt, 1944). Wanda Petronski tells classmates she has a hundred dresses of all varieties in her closet at home. So why does she always wear the same old worn dress to school? The teasing that follows seems harmless, but it's not. This book explores the hurt that comes from thoughtless words, and offers a painful, but heart-warming lesson in forgiveness. Christina Moore reads the unabridged story with warmth and expression. The author's carefully chosen words stand on their own without the distraction of sound effects or music. This is a well-done production of an exceptional book that has earned its place as a childhood classic. |
Foreign Customer Review / 国外客户评价: |
| I first read this book as a girl more than 40 years ago, and I still love it.
I've noticed something about this book that many reviews (and many of the lesson plans I've read) seem to miss, and I think it's an important point: This isn't the story of Wanda Petronski. It's the story of Maddie, an ordinary person who quietly assents to evil and then must live with her conscience. It's very tough stuff for young readers (and older ones), both deep and dark. I remember my own daughters finding it to be rough going emotionally, because Maddie's epiphany comes when the possibility of redemption is past, leaving her only with regret. This is unusual in children's fiction (and adults'), where the norm is for the central character--the character with whom the reader identifies--to be granted a second chance to make the compassionate choice. Estes quite deliberately, and, I think, properly, gave the book a real-life ending, where understanding occurs after the moment of truth has irretrievably gone by, and we realize that the next step, the step that occurs after the end of the story, is for the character and, by extension, the reader, to decide how to live her life from that point on.
Wanda is not, as far as we know, a Jew, but this is nevertheless a Holocaust story, as well as a Civil Rights story, a story about tolerance and compassion but also a story about how evil flourishes when people of good will do not speak out.
Estes is kind enough to her characters to allow Wanda the spirit and determination to rise above the rejection of her classmates, and to allow her to gracefully (but incorrectly) attribute the best of motives to Maddie and Peggy. In a way, though, her nobility makes Maddie's enlightenment even more bitter. Somehow, having our victims respond badly to our victimizing lets us off the hook: "She was a nasty person anyway." (I'll have to admit, part of me has always wondered if Wanda was being disingenuous or sarcastic in her final note. Was she deliberately putting the screws on Maddie and Peggy?)
This book is extraordinarily and deceptively powerful, with its combination of quiet tone, enchanting pictures, and hard-hitting (but not overbearing) message. Girls will be particularly intrigued and inspired by the dresses themselves; the idea is compelling, and many will want to draw their own dresses. Most children will, I think, want to focus on that aspect of the story, rather than on Maddie's learning experience. The dresses are so liberating, both for Wanda and for the child's imagination, that parents and teachers will want to encourage young readers to rejoice in that aspect of the story, even as they guide them through the sad and difficult emotional concepts presented in this lovely, but heartrending, book. |
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