“Swim Team: Small Waves, Big Changes” by Johnnie Christmas

admin July 29, 2022

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Swimmers, By Maria Jose Ferrada. Illustration by Mariana Alcantara. Translated by Kit Maude.
Diving summer, By Sarah Stridsburg. Illustration by Sara Lundberg. Translated by BJ Woodstein.
Swimming team: small waves, big changes, Johnny Christmas.

“What do you think when you think about swimming?” Recently, when I asked a high school student’s classroom, there were a wide range of answers such as “fun,” “a little scary,” “family,” and “summer,” but “freedom.” The answer came out. We love that our relationships with water spur conversations about more.

Two new picture books and graphic novels treat swimming as a vast entity, making it slippery with promise. They lure young readers of all ages to interact with the world in unconventional ways.

The idea of a “swimmer” began with charcoal, collage and fluorescent ink artwork by Mariana Alcantara. Maria Jose Ferrada has added a poetic fragment that tells a fantastic story about fish dreaming of becoming Olympic swimmers and Olympic swimmers dreaming of being fish.

The story is non-linear, but its shape supports the idea that water is a place of play and potential. The usual formal rules in which we live do not apply here. Seeing a watch half-sunk in a fishbowl, a fish in a swimsuit, and a swimmer with fins shows a fluid interaction between the worlds.

“At the end of the 150-meter race, all the fish wake up at the same time. They never have a dream they want to wake up, but they are not sad …. when the world was the world and the sea was the sea. It’s a dream that fish have dreamed of since then, and it will always be. “

Zoe, the girl at the heart of the second picture book “The Summer of Diving” by Swedish novelist and playwright Sara Stridsberg, has a great deal of ability to imagine things could change someday. Is important to.

The book begins one morning at a breakfast table with Zoe and her mother and is portrayed in the lush, colorful art of Sara Lundberg, who won both the Swedish Grand Prize and the August Prize. .. Zoe’s father suddenly disappeared mysteriously. Maybe everyone else knows it all the time. The cessation of knowledge spreads over the first few pages and evokes too common childhood emotions. No one tells you anything.. The truth is revealed when his mother and daughter arrive at the hospital to visit Zoe’s father, who is suffering from severe depression.

Zoe is confused by the locked door, the “angel” who watches over his father, and the sadness of holding him down. Then, under the blue bathrobe, a charming woman named Sabina in a red swimsuit appears. “Shall we swim?” She asks Zoe.

Do you have a pool? Is there no sea? no matter. She is full of her imagination and spins the earth. “Sabina is competing in the World Championships in Toronto, and one day she will swim across the Pacific Ocean.”

As the sun unleashes in the seasons, Sabina becomes an unexpected angel for Zoe. Zoe visits even when her father is too sad to see her. In the spring, Sabina and Zoe jump off the park bench and swim on the grass.

It’s not clear what Sabina’s illness is, but Zoe sometimes sees her disappear. She waits for her to come back. Zoe asks Sabina if her father will come back too. “How can I find out? I’m not a psychic, right?” Sabina reacts with her characteristic dullness. She has no easy answer. But it’s easier to wait with her friends.

“When my dad finally arrived, Sabina and I were swimming around the world several times,” Zoe tells us. “My dad is like a tree. In winter he pretends to be dead. Then he is reincarnated in summer.” Stridsberg’s view of the child’s view of mental illness is that young people have a knowledge gap. It reminds us of the openness to unlikely friendships, the vulnerability of formation, and how that memory explains how to survive into adulthood.

Comic creator Johnny Christmas (best known for his collaboration with Margaret Atwood in “Angel”) is a middle-aged graphic novel sparkler, “Swim Team,” to connect multiple generations of “Swim Sisters.” , Both individual and group memories are essential. A graphic novel arrangement of the “Catbird” series and William Gibson’s lost “Alien3” script). His latest protagonist, Bree, hasn’t seen her normally very careful single father appear for her since moving from New York to Florida, changing schools, and starting a new, time-consuming job. I’m navigating that. When it turns out that her only elective, still open in the new school, is Swim 101, she has to confront one of her greatest horrors, the water.

Etta, an elderly neighbor on the second floor of Bree, is a former swimming champion. After she saved Bree, who was about to drown in the pool in the apartment, she taught her to swim, and it’s only for her beginners.

Swimming is fun, but swimming in the United States reflects the history of pools and beaches as a space of privilege and exclusion where white dominates, especially for black Americans. Christmas brings all of this to Etta’s rich life, where her complex girlhood as a black swimmer motivates Bree.

Enter the Enitobricht Manatees. Bree’s new school is named after the first black woman to win an Olympic medal in swimming. The swimming team is vulnerable to fighting threatened pool closures and Snoopy rival school teams. Characters are portrayed with warmth and personality — many even villains are included.

I write Christmas from the bottom of my heart. When he was young, he survived drowning. Questions such as affiliation, abilities, racial justice, and who swims are handled with caution. This is Christmas’s debut for middle school, but its nuanced storytelling and visual appeal go beyond this age group and meaning.

Growing up, I loved my swimming team and spent with me the lessons I learned from my experience: how to be good teammates and citizens, how water makes us all stand out. I love “swim team” For the same reason.. When I was a kid, it took me a long time to figure out how to talk about the importance of being in a swimming community with diverse bodies of all shapes and shades. You would have loved this book back then. I’m excited that it’s here now.

Bonnie Tsui is the author of “Why We Swim”. Her debut children’s book, Sarah and the Big Wave: The True Story of the First Woman to Surf Mavericks, was published last year.