The Hundred Dresses

The Hundred Dresses is a children's book by the American writer Eleanor Estes, published in 1944 and illustrated by Louis Slobodkin. It is a short book, and it was written for children of about ten.

Wanda Petronski is the girl at the centre of it. She is Polish, she goes to a school in Connecticut where the other children see her as different, and her grades are good.

She wears the same faded blue dress every day, and it is always clean but looks as though it has been washed and never ironed. When the other children laugh at her name and her dress, she tells them that she has a hundred dresses at home, and the claim becomes the thing they tease her about.

Then she stops coming to school, and the two girls who led the teasing have to think about what they did. The book is about how a group of children treats somebody who is outside it, and about what the two girls who led the teasing have to work through afterwards.