Trudy’s Big Swim: How Gertrude Ederle Swam the English Channel and Took the World by Storm
Sue Macy, illus. by Matt Collins. Holiday House, $16.95 (40p) ISBN 978-0-8234-3665-1
Macy and Collins, the duo behind 2011’s Basketball Belles, pay lively tribute to another feat of female athleticism: American swimmer Gertrude Ederle’s record-setting 1926 swim across the English Channel: “Two hundred people had tried to swim the Channel before. Only five men had made it, and none on their first try.” Collins’s aggressive mixed-media artwork is well-suited to the tension and physicality of Ederle’s swim; in one especially cinematic scene, she’s shown surging through cold, choppy water filled with jellyfish and driftwood, a look of determination evident beneath her red swimming cap and goggles. An afterword dives deeper into Ederle’s story; in a fitting coda, Collins ends with a vignette of the happily exhausted swimmer lounging in a bubble bath at her hotel in Dover, following her victorious arrival on the English shore. Ages 6–10. (Feb.)
Details
Reviewed on: 02/13/2017
Genre: Children's
Paperback - 40 pages - 978-0-8234-4189-1