My Girlfriend Made Me Wear Her Prom Dress Stories
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The story follows several different teen girls, but predominantly the character of Robin- a dancer who spends s
A few weeks ago I'd been taking a trip down memory lane as far as teen fiction went & I remembered this book. Upon recalling the many, many times I'd read this book (my copy had long since disintegrated due to repeated readings by my friends & I during my younger years), I had to purchase a copy. While I did enjoy it much more as a teenager, the book still has a little magic left in it.The story follows several different teen girls, but predominantly the character of Robin- a dancer who spends some of her days helping to care for the elderly Rowena. One day Robin comes across a beautiful old lace dress that seems to whisper to it "wear me". Despite Rowena refusing her request to wear the dress, Robin decides to steal the dress... only to end up with something precious taken from her forever. From there the dress goes to different girls, all of which get the dress through less than savory means, running the risk of gaining the wrath of the dress's curse!
This isn't the deepest read out there, I'll be honest. However, it is a very entertaining read & that is sometimes what does matter. With more than a few companies out there picking up the expired licenses for old teen horror reads, I'm surprised that this one hasn't been renewed. Sure, there's a little slang in it that screams 90s, but for the most part the elements in this were timeless.
Despite the obvious shortcomings of all of the girls in the book (warning- there's no good girls in this book), they are all likable characters & I was able to commiserate with them. Some could argue that the girls are a little too delusional in their expectations of their chosen beaus (oh yes, most of the reasons for wearing the dress surround gaining male attention), but that feeds into the selfishness of the people in the book.
If you are looking for deeper reading, then you won't really find it here. If you want a good entertaining read that will keep you coming back (like it did me), then this is something that I recommend you find a copy of. The prices out there for this are very good, so it isn't hard to find a good price for this book.
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Robin, a dancer, wants so badly to have the perfect dress for prom to impress her boyfriend, the most popular boy at school. The old woman she volunteers for offers up a couple of dresses in her attic, but Robin wants the one dress Miss Catherine has insisted Robin not wear - a lacy cream-colored gown. The dress calls to Robin and she steals it from Miss Catherine. Bu
The cover of this book looked so familiar I thought I had read it. But in reading it again, I didn't remember any of the details.Robin, a dancer, wants so badly to have the perfect dress for prom to impress her boyfriend, the most popular boy at school. The old woman she volunteers for offers up a couple of dresses in her attic, but Robin wants the one dress Miss Catherine has insisted Robin not wear - a lacy cream-colored gown. The dress calls to Robin and she steals it from Miss Catherine. But then at prom she suffers a horrible accident. Then a nurse at the hospital finds the dress and it calls to her, too. Girl after girl falls prey to the dress, which seems to destroy their one positive trait. Where will the curse stop?
The girls in this book were so preoccupied with impressing their boyfriends or some guy they were crushing on. Robin, the dancer, and Nicole, the brainiac, were at least talented in some way. Felicia was the worst. She wants her boyfriend Mark, a divinity student, to think she's this pure as the driven snow pillar of virtue, and constantly references the slutty clothes she used to wear. Then when she wears this Victorian era dress, she feels it getting tighter and making her look slutty, until she takes it off in the bathroom and runs out of the house, accidentally stealing some jewelry and then continues lying about the whole thing. Oh yes, the dress made me lose my morality! Felicia probably shouldn't have tried to be something she wasn't, and if Mark was going to look down on her then maybe she shouldn't have been dating him. I mean, Robin and Nicole had permanent bodily damage and Felicia thinks she's worse off. And the back story about Miss Catherine and her sister Rowena who cursed the dress was silly. Never mind that I couldn't imagine anyone being all excited about a high-neck lacy and silk number.
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This is just the first of a quartet of stories about desperate, besotted girls and a cursed prom dress that brings woe to anyone who wears it. I liked how these tales were very much interconnected, how each one continued
What a cruel book. Imagine a girl, pretty but without money to spare, having the time of her life with her rich, awesome beau. Our prom queen has everything going for her, but Fate in the guise of a smuggled dress has other plans. You know what they say - the higher you fly . . .This is just the first of a quartet of stories about desperate, besotted girls and a cursed prom dress that brings woe to anyone who wears it. I liked how these tales were very much interconnected, how each one continued on even as others were brought to the fore. If they thought that it was finished with them even as it dined on other prey, they were sadly mistaken.
I liked the way it was written. Its prose is of a higher caliber than most retro YA horror, with a smooth and accessible voice that's neither disjointed nor clumsy.
The story's where it's at though,
and one can't help but feel for the girls as the dress caromed from one misfortune to another. I winced at how they were relishing all the adulation and esteem it brought them only for their whole world to collapse before the night is through. The creatively ironic ways the latter dispensed its sadistic wave of tortures was just stunning. It was just evil how it homed in on the very thing that its victims deem most important before wresting it away from them.
I'm rating it 7.5/10 or 4 stars out of 5
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It's funny how my memory of this book is so tied up in the cover. The gloooowwwwing dresssssss! The girl who looks like she'd fit right in at Sweet Valley High! (That series was an obsession for pre-teen me.)
As I read through some of the reviews on here, parts of the story came flooding back. Not enough to properly critique the thing, but more than enough for me to recall being fr
A friend is currently re-reading some horror books she loved back in the day, which prompted me to look this one up.It's funny how my memory of this book is so tied up in the cover. The gloooowwwwing dresssssss! The girl who looks like she'd fit right in at Sweet Valley High! (That series was an obsession for pre-teen me.)
As I read through some of the reviews on here, parts of the story came flooding back. Not enough to properly critique the thing, but more than enough for me to recall being freaked out while reading. Oh, oh! And to remember that the first girl also had a flapper-style dress she could have picked? I think that's right. I seem to recall wondering why the heck she didn't go Roaring 20s style - it seemed infinitely more appealing.
I'd like to think I was smart enough when younger to mentally chide the girls for thieving just so they'd look pretty for a boy. If he doesn't like you as you are, honey, no bit of lace is going to do the job.
Ahhhh, memories.
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This was very strange but also fascinating. This definitely took me back to way simpler times and I loved it.
Now I'm afraid to wear clothes.....
"Once I planted the idea of the forbidden dress in your mind, I knew you'd search it out. The more you resisted, the stronger it became until you had to have it."This was very strange but also fascinating. This definitely took me back to way simpler times and I loved it.
Now I'm afraid to wear clothes.....
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I'm totally going to hunt this down and read it again, because it's probably terrible. I remember doing a booktalk for it in sixth grade (yes, I loved it that much), and it went something like this:
"And so t
Yet another book I can't review objectively because I loved it and read it over and over and over when I was young. I'm positive I stole this one from my sister, too. Poor sister. Look at the close up of that desireable prom dress on the cover, though! Isn't it, uh, ideal for todays hip kids?I'm totally going to hunt this down and read it again, because it's probably terrible. I remember doing a booktalk for it in sixth grade (yes, I loved it that much), and it went something like this:
"And so then this girl gets the dress, wears it, and SOMETHING HAPPENS BUT I CAN'T TELL YOU WHAT! But then this other girl finds the dress, wears it to a party, and SOMETHING HAPPENS, BUT I CAN'T TELL YOU WHAT!" etc, etc.
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I do remember the urban legend about a girl who bought one from a secondhand store to wear to her prom and she ended up dying...did you hear that one? It came from a funeral home and the formaldehyde used on a dead body seeped into the dress and then filled the poor girl's pores as she sweated on the dance floor.
That was kind of plausible and creepy but Prom Dress by Lael Littke goes for more of a paranormal twist and truthfully.
I was wondering just how can you make a story about a dress scary?I do remember the urban legend about a girl who bought one from a secondhand store to wear to her prom and she ended up dying...did you hear that one? It came from a funeral home and the formaldehyde used on a dead body seeped into the dress and then filled the poor girl's pores as she sweated on the dance floor.
That was kind of plausible and creepy but Prom Dress by Lael Littke goes for more of a paranormal twist and truthfully...it's not that bad.
I would say my five star rating is more of a 4 and 1/2 stars just because the way the dress is described...I don't even think late 1980s teenage girls would want to wear a dress from the 1920s especially if it is the dress on the cover. Yes that's the part I find hard to believe...
Reading the description on the back I was skeptical at first in how you can pull the fates of four girls into one story without it being terribly confusing but Littke is a great writer (I also enjoyed The Watcher and her short story in Thirteen as well) that I had no trouble following the destruction of this fatal frock.
We start with dancer Robin who is new to Forest Dale and ends up with the most handsome and richest boy in school, Tyler Atkins. Prom is coming up and the Whitford family is not very financially stable, Robin, her mother and her sister Gabrielle having inherited the Victorian home they live in.
Robin works as a companion for Catherine MacFarlane next door to earn money and the older lady is letting Robin borrow some of her old dresses for a dance recital they are doing that involves music of the 1920s. Miss Catherine says Robin can take two of them but not...the one of cream lace.
Robin sees the dress and she becomes obsessed to wear it to the prom...a dress like that on the arm of the well to do Tyler and his parents will be so impressed.
Against the old woman's warning, Robin takes the dress and wears it to the prom but her dream night turns into a nightmare that begins a chain of events which wrap around her sister and two other young women...
Felicia Martin is a nurse working at the hospital and she's there the night the girl arrives in the cream-colored gown of lace. She's intrigued it's just the dress she needs to wear to a party at the home of the dean of her boyfriend Mark's divinity school.
Her father always obsessed about money but being the wife of a minister sounds like Heaven to Felicia but she's unaware that the perfect dress was made out of envy and wrath for which she will pay for someone else's sin...
Nicole Eckhart is in high school and she's a smart girl, one of the brightest on her academic decathlon team, but she's never felt beautiful until she finds the blue garment bag with the lacy, cream-colored dress. She feels that Fate is on her side, it's all lining up to make her dream come true.
Not to win the decathlon but there's a reception being held for all the participants and she wants to finally have their coach, her secret crush Mr. Steve Waring, see her as more than a human computer. What could be a beautiful fantasy is about to be a terrible tragedy...
I can't really reveal much about how Gabrielle gets tied into the story without major spoilers but it's very easy to figure out if you pay attention to Robin's story. We get an epilogue and a few background details to let us discover the origin of the titular dress and it's all very mysterious.
It's like a very modern urban legend where you can't tell if there may be some sort of supernatural reason these things are happening and I like that it's not so clear...it's ambiguous enough to let your mind come to its own conclusions. There's not really a huge climax but an interesting reveal and an ending that is to me just *chef's kiss*
I highly recommend Prom Dress to any Point Horror fan who has yet to read it...
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I know it's mean to be happy when others are hurting, but the characters in this book kind of deserved what they got. Although I would excuse them since it really is the dress was amplifying their negative ideas. I like the twist and I truly wanna see this magically evil dress. How interesting. It gave me some of that "Christine" (Stephen King) vibes.
I thank OPEN LIBRARY for lending this book to me for some days. ☺️
Another surprisingly satisfying Point Horror book.I know it's mean to be happy when others are hurting, but the characters in this book kind of deserved what they got. Although I would excuse them since it really is the dress was amplifying their negative ideas. I like the twist and I truly wanna see this magically evil dress. How interesting. It gave me some of that "Christine" (Stephen King) vibes.
I thank OPEN LIBRARY for lending this book to me for some days. ☺️
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Even so, probably the better part of 30 years later, there was a lot I didn't remember. (For example, the fact that four different people wear the dress through the course of the book--five, if you
When I was in elementary school, my classmates and I were OBSESSED with Scholastic's Point horror imprint. We read Christopher Pike and RL Stine's Fear Street books, too, and we also loved them. But these books are basically my horcrux. I couldn't tell you how many times I read this one, in particular.Even so, probably the better part of 30 years later, there was a lot I didn't remember. (For example, the fact that four different people wear the dress through the course of the book--five, if you count Miss Catherine.) And yes, the book is just as cheesy as the cover would have you believe. It was also really, really fun and I love everything about it.
It was also really interesting reading this book in 2020. There's a part where Felicia (the nurse who is the second person to wear the dress) mentions that she had a date with her boyfriend the next morning at 8. (She's working the evening shift and hopes to be home and in bed by midnight so she can be "clear-eyed and sparkling...the way Mark liked her." She is also pretty sure he'll want them to take a brisk walk after breakfast, although he'll be OK if she's too tired "but she liked to please him, because he was always so caring and considerate." Felicia, someone who is caring and considerate won't make you meet him at 8am after you didn't get to sleep until after midnight. That kind of person meets you for brunch the next morning and exercises alone.
Even so, I'm so happy I got to read this again. It was a real delight. And she's written a few more books that I would love to track down...
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Score: 4.5
My full review and recap with plenty of memes, snarl, and spoilers can be found on my blog:
https://www.danstalter.com/prom-dress/
(I'm also happy Tyler ended up being faithful to Robin and wasn't an F-boy like he was made out to potentially be in the beginning!) ...more
CAREER:
Gates Rubber Co., Denver, CO, secretary, 1952-54; Life Insurance Association of America, New York, NY, secretary, 1954-60; worked as a medical secretary for a physician in New York, NY, 1960-63; writer, 1963--. Taught writing classes in writers' programs at Pasadena City College and University of California--Los Angeles, 1978-88.
AWARDS:
Southern California Council on Children's Literature Award for notable work of fiction, 1992, for Blue Skye; Best Books for the Teen Age, New York Public Library, 2003, for Lake of Secrets.
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Source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1154193.Prom_Dress
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