The Costume Trunk is a children’s picture book. Courtney and her friends discover the magical world of Paddywhack Lane where all they need is their imagination to have fun. As a member of From Left to Write book club, I received a copy of this book to use as inspiration for a post, rather than a review. You can read other members’ posts inspired by The Costume Trunk by Bob Fuller on book club day, July 28 at From Left to Write.

The Costume Trunk brought a memory of dress-up from my childhood. On the rare rainy day in the summer, the neighborhood girls would gather at one friend’s house because she had a dress-up box with four fancy party dresses that were floor-length on our short bodies. Four dresses, four girls, and one reader (me). Naturally, I decided we had to be the Little Women and assigned myself the plum role of Jo March. I wasn’t much of a director so I don’t recall that we did much acting out of the scenes. The fun part was all the fuss of dressing ourselves up in these pretty clothes, a sharp contrast to our normal summer garb of shorts and tennis shoes.

I shared another memory of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott in this post: Book Review: The Little Women Letters by Gabrielle Donnelly. And I bribed a number of memories by other people in the comments to this post: Literary Giveaway Blog Hop and Little Women memories. I don’t have a giveaway today to encourage more memories, but I would love to hear your stories of either Little Women or dressing-up games.

I read The Costume Trunk to a group of 5 and 6 year old day-campers yesterday and they got all excited at the page where the children donned their costumes, competing to be the first to claim “I’m the princess!” or “I’m the pirate!” Following our reading session, I donated the book to their camp, SPROG.