03/08/2026
STO SUKIENEK Eleanor Estes wydana przez nas to ponadczasowy klasyk 🥰
Today's A Mighty Girl Community Pick: "The Hundred Dresses" by Eleanor Estes. Wanda Petronski is the only Polish immigrant girl in her small Connecticut school, and to most of her classmates in Room 13 she is invisible -- a quiet child from the poor edge of town who wears the same faded blue dress every day and whose last name, "Petronski," draws snickers and mocked pronunciations from the moment the teacher calls it. Then, one bright morning, when the other girls are crowded around a classmate's new red dress, Wanda tries to enter the conversation by mentioning, without meaning to boast, that she has one hundred beautiful dresses at home, all lined up in her closet. Popular, pretty Peggy decides on the spot that Wanda is lying, and turns "How many dresses do you have today, Wanda?" into a daily game the whole class can play. Peggy's best friend Maddie -- a girl almost as poor as Wanda, whose own dresses are Peggy's castoffs -- knows the teasing is wrong. But she says nothing. She is too afraid Peggy might turn on her next.
The teasing does not end at recess or at the classroom door. It follows Wanda home to her father, who has heard the word "Po**ck" shouted at his children long enough. In a letter to the teacher that the whole class hears read aloud, Jan Petronski explains, in the halting English of a man still learning the language of a country that has never fully welcomed him, that his family is leaving town for the city, where he hopes no one will ask his children why their names are funny. It is only after Wanda is gone that her classmates discover what her hundred dresses really were: a hundred exquisite drawings, submitted to the school art contest, of the wardrobe she had been quietly imagining. Maddie is left with the ache of what her silence has cost, and she promises herself she is "never going to stand by and say nothing again."
Told through Maddie's eyes and illustrated by Caldecott Medal-winning artist Louis Slobodkin's luminous watercolors, this Newbery Honor Book from 1944 -- which Eleanor Estes based on something she had witnessed as a girl and could not forget -- remains one of the most powerful books ever written for young readers about the cost of turning away when a classmate is treated as less than fully human because they are different. Highly recommended for ages 6 and up.
"The Hundred Dresses" is available at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780152051709 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/3U98Hg3 (Amazon)
For a moving picture book that has been called a modern version of this classic tale, we also highly recommend "Each Kindness" for ages 5 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/each-kindness
For a Newbery Medal-winning middle grade memoir in verse about a Vietnamese girl whose family flees Saigon and settles in Alabama, where she must survive both grief and the cruelty of American children who see her as different, we recommend "Inside Out & Back Again" for ages 9 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/inside-out-and-back-again
For a middle grade novel about a Pakistani American girl navigating middle school friendship, family expectations, and the aftermath of a hate crime against her mosque, we recommend "Amina's Voice" for ages 9 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/amina-s-voice
For an award-winning middle grade novel-in-verse about a Syrian refugee girl adjusting to life in Cincinnati while her country falls apart at home, we recommend "Other Words for Home" for ages 10 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/other-words-for-home
For more books for children and teens about the importance of standing up for others, regardless of the differences between them, visit our blog post "60 Mighty Girl Books About Standing Up for Others” at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=13481
