The Little Engine That Could
Synopsis: A train carrying toys to the children on the other side of the mountain breaks down. Dispairing, the toys beg passing trains to help them reach their destination, but are steadily rejected by cars too powerful and important to help. Finally, a Little Blue Engine, tiny though it is, offers to help. He "thinks he can" all the way across the mountain and into town to the delight of the toys and the boys and girls they belong to.
Citation: Piper, Watty. The Little Engine That Could. (2005) Illus. by Loren Long. New York: Philomel.
My Thoughts: This classic tale has something for everyone, and the new illustrations by Loren Long are colorful and engaging. I'm glad this popular story is still around to help kids today believe in themselves.
Library usage: I'm currently in the process of adapting this for a puppet show for our Summer Reading Club (Catch the Reading Express!). I know that the known tale combined with puppets is sure to be a hit. You could also do this story for a reader's theatre or anything with trains.
Review:
PreS-Gr. 1. The new edition of this American classic pairs the original (1930) text with artwork by Loren Long, whose previous picture books include Madonna's Mr. Peabody's Apples (2003) and Walt Whitman's When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer (2004). Grand in scale but cozy in effect, the impressive acrylic paintings use subtle strokes of rich colors to create a series of narrative scenes large enough to be clearly visible back to the last row of storytime or classroom. The characters remain convincing as dolls, toys, and trains despite the slight changes in expression, position, and emotion that bring them to life. The most memorable elements of the artwork, though, are the fluid lines, rounded shapes, and warm colors of the lyrical landscapes, which are reminiscent of paintings by Thomas Hart Benton. Chances are the unassuming Little Blue Engine never expected such a handsome showcase, even for her finest hour, but this edition provides a brilliant new setting that many readers will prefer to the original picture book.--Carolyn Phelan
Could, The Little Engine That, and Carolyn Phelan. "Piper, Watty. The Little Engine That Could." Booklist 1 Sept. 2005: 145. Literature Resource Center. Web.
The Hundred Dresses
Synopsis: Wanda Petronski wears the same faded dress to school every day. One day, after seeing a classmate's new dress, Wanda announces that she has 100 dresses at home. The other children tease her about this since she still wears the same dress, always clean though never properly ironed. Maddie and Peggy made a game out of teasing Wanda. The truth is revealed however when Wanda submits her 100 drawings of dresses to the class's art contest. But Wanda has moved. Too late, Maddie and Peggy feel guilty for their teasing. They write a letter to apologize and with it's answer, they learn the true nature of friendship.
Citation: Estes, Eleanor. The Hundred Dresses. (1972). Illust. by Louis Slobodkin. San Diego: Voyager.
My thoughts: This is a hard book to read. The main characters are not very nice girls, and it's heartwrenching to see their abuse of Wanda. The redemption they find in the in is nice, but not quite the justice I would like in a book. I do like the artwork. The soft drawings fit so perfectly with the pace and emotion of the story. I still would like to hear the story from Wanda's side though.
Library usage: This would be fun to read over a few weeks and talk with the kids about teasing. Then you could have an art contest and have everyone draw something inspired by the book, or all draw the same thing (I wouldn't say dresses for the girls and boats for the boys, but you could).
Reviews:
Mean girls--think of Laura Ingalls's nemesis Nellie Oleson or Harriet the Spy's Marion Hawthorne--abound in children's literature. While we can shudder at their nastiness and rejoice in their comeuppance, rarely are we allowed the chance to see things from their point of view.
But Eleanor Estes's The Hundred Dresses (1944), recently reissued by Harcourt with an introduction by the author's daughter, Helena Estes, is the story of a mean girl--or, more precisely, a mean girl's best friend, all the more culpable for her self-perception. Peggy and her acolyte Maddie, "the girls who started all the fun," begin taunting the hitherto ignored Wanda Petronski the morning Wanda ill-advisedly volunteers that while she may wear the same dress to school every day, she has a hundred dresses lined up in her closet at home; shoes, too: "Every pair is different. All colors. All lined up."
And like her dresses, much discussed but not seen, Wanda is herself absent from Estes's story. The book begins, "Today, Monday, Wanda Petronski was not in her seat," and although the incidences of her victimization, and the barest outline of her life, are recalled in the narration, she is present only in retrospect. Wanda never does come back to school, and in the "now" of the story we hear from her only at the end, in a letter that is both thematically convenient and deeply ambiguous. The secret of the hundred dresses has been revealed--they are glorious drawings, which Miss Mason has hung all around Room 13. Miss Mason also has read to the students a letter from Wanda's father announcing that, in the face of prejudice, the family has moved away to the big city where "no more holler Polack," and the repentant Peggy and Maddie write a friendly note to Wanda to tell her that she won Room 13's drawing contest. Wanda doesn't reply to this letter, but she does write to Miss Mason, asking her to give the pictures away to the girls in the class, with two in particular earmarked for Peggy and Maddie. A hundred dresses, or a hundred knives?
While Peggy, her conscience easily massaged, twice assures Maddie that "[Wanda] must have really liked us," Maddie is not so sure. She tries to agree with Peggy. In an almost sardonic piece of characterization, Estes shows Maddie imagining herself heroically "saving" Wanda over and over. She even resolves to never "stand by and do nothing again." But in the end, Maddie is only able to blink back tears. Helena Estes believes the character of Maddie was based on Eleanor herself, but if so the author took no pains to withhold judgment on this little girl. While Maddie is the conscience of the book, it's a guilty one: "True, she had not enjoyed listening to Peggy ask Wanda how many dresses she had in her closet, but she had said nothing. She had stood by silently, and that was just as bad as what Peggy had done. Worse. She was a coward."
Worse. I can't imagine that as fastidious a writer as Eleanor Estes did not know precisely what she was doing in driving that single-word sentence straight to the heart of Maddie's unflinching self-analysis.
In her 1944 Horn Book review of The Hundred Dresses, Alice Jordan seems to miss this point completely. After praising the story for its "rare intuition," she writes, "Wanda is a Polish child possessing imagination and a gifted hand, in the midst of a modern matter-of-fact group of American school girls, who didn't see how she could possibly have a hundred dresses." Perhaps when it comes to schoolyard bullies Jordan is more generous--or euphemistic--than I; but still, is The Hundred Dresses truly a story about imagination versus pragmatism? I don't think it's Wanda's story at all, however much more comfortable it would be for readers to identify with her--the talented, the put-upon--than with the goodhearted but morally reticent Maddie. In 1944, it may have been possible to see The Hundred Dresses as a lesson about "being nice," and it would have been salutary, brave, even, to see it as a book about prejudice. When Jordan wrote that there was "a happy ending to a story which threatens to be sad," it's as if she couldn't bear to see the sadness in front of her, and, like Peggy, rewrote the story to make herself feel better. But now, as then, Estes's portrait of an uneased conscience is hard to look at--and just as necessary.
Roger Sutton is editor in chief of The Horn Book Magazine.
Sutton, Roger. "The Hundred Dresses." The Horn Book Magazine Nov.-Dec. 2004: 737+. Literature Resource Center. Web.
" . . . beautiful in its understanding of child character and belief in the essential goodness of a child's heart, most beautiful in blending pictures and story." --NY Herald Tribune Book Review
" . . . will take its place with the books that endure." --Saturday Review
Awards: Newbery Honor Winner, 1945
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