The Missing Wedding Dress Featuring Barbie by Karen Krugman

(This week I'm doing my first series, and it's books that I found delightful. I mean this in the best possible way: books that filled me with delight. This came about organically; I realized I was using 'delightful' to describe a lot of the books I was using, and rather than reaching for a thesaurus I'm going to embrace it.)

The delight in this book comes from the fact that I found it again after only having a memory of it for many years. I definitely remember reading it as a child, but I'm not sure if I owned it or it was housed in a church playroom or something like that. Anyway, this is a Little Golden Book, featuring Barbie. It's her friend Tracy's wedding, and Barbie (the maid of honor) and Skipper (the flower girl, even though she looks to be about twelve years old) are helping her get everything ready. On the day of the wedding, though, an unfortunate incident with Barbie's cat means that Tracy's dress needs mending. When they go to pick up the dress, though, they end up with a boxful of shoes instead of the wedding gown! Can Barbie follow the clues and figure out where Tracy's dress is in time for the wedding?

The book itself isn't that remarkable, but I remember really loving the illustrations (done by Laura Westlake in what looks like bright pencil crayons). It was incredible to open the book again and have those memories come flooding back to me. I remember studying one image of Barbie in particular, trying to mimic her hand gesture (now an interesting thought in the ways that people study and construct ideas of beauty and femininity).

Read it with:
Barbie: Four Decades of Fashion, Fantasy, and Fun by Marco Tosa
Feminism and Pop Culture by Andi Zeisler
The Case of the Cat's Meow by Crosby Newell Bonsall
The Lime Green Secret by Georgia Graham