Wanda is a young Polish immigrant who lives in a town in Connecticut. She, her father Jan, and her brother Jake live in a small home in Boggins Heights, an undesirable part of town. The other students in her class, Room 13, actively exclude and bully her. Wanda uses her imagination to escape the difficult realities of her life; she imagines having a wardrobe filled with beautiful, colorful dresses, shoes, and hats. This helps her cope with her family’s poverty, her struggles with language, and her isolation at school.

Wanda is a talented artist; she wins the class drawing contest with her 100 drawings of beautiful dresses. Her family eventually leaves town for the city, hoping that they will experience less discrimination there. At the conclusion of the novel, the reader learns that Wanda is a kind person who treats those who excluded and bullied her with generosity and forgiveness when she leaves two of her beautiful drawings to Peggy and Maddie.

The Hundred Dresses is told from the perspective of Maddie. Maddie is a classmate of Wanda’s. She is ashamed of her family’s relative poverty and fears becoming a target of the same bullying from which Wanda suffers; this causes her to remain silent when her friend, Peggy, mocks Wanda’s talk of dresses.