Swimming has grown to be one of the most loved and played sports in the entire world. If you think of the word swim, you think of splashing waves, summertime, and the freedom of the water around you, and three books have portrayed these qualities very well.
The first book, “Swimmers”, is a children’s picture book. The charcoal, collage, and fluorescent ink drawings, done by Mariana Alcantara, and the poetic lines tell a story about fish dreaming about being Olympic swimmers and Olympic swimmers dreaming about being fish.
“The fish all wake up at the same time, just when they’ve finished the 150-meter race. Even though it’s never a dream they want to wake up from, they aren’t sad. … It’s a dream that has been dreamed by fish since the world was the world and the sea was the sea, and it always will be,” it said in the book.
The second book, named “The Summer of Diving” by Sara Stridsberg, is also picture book with a protagonist named Zoe. When Zoe’s father becomes missing due to depression, she meets a woman named Sabina who asks her to swim.
They swim on the grass and dive on the park benches in their red swimsuits. “When my dad finally comes, Sabina and I have swum around the world a few times. My dad is like the trees. In the winter he pretends to be dead. Then he is reborn in the summer,” Zoe says.
The final book, “Swim Team” by Johnnie Christmas, is a comic book about a girl named Bree. In the book, she moves to a new school where she is forced to do the elective Swim 101. In the comic, Bree faces one of her biggest fears: water.
Bree’s neighbor, Etta, is a former swim champion, and she teaches Bree how to swim. “Swimming is joyful, but what swimming looks like in America reflects the history of pools and beaches as white-dominated spaces of privilege and exclusion, especially for Black Americans. Christmas brings all this to rich life in Etta, whose complicated girlhood as a Black swimmer motivates Bree,” said Bonnie Tsui, a journalist in the New York Times.
Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/29/books/review/johnnie-christmas-swim-team.html
The first book, “Swimmers”, is a children’s picture book. The charcoal, collage, and fluorescent ink drawings, done by Mariana Alcantara, and the poetic lines tell a story about fish dreaming about being Olympic swimmers and Olympic swimmers dreaming about being fish.
“The fish all wake up at the same time, just when they’ve finished the 150-meter race. Even though it’s never a dream they want to wake up from, they aren’t sad. … It’s a dream that has been dreamed by fish since the world was the world and the sea was the sea, and it always will be,” it said in the book.
The second book, named “The Summer of Diving” by Sara Stridsberg, is also picture book with a protagonist named Zoe. When Zoe’s father becomes missing due to depression, she meets a woman named Sabina who asks her to swim.
They swim on the grass and dive on the park benches in their red swimsuits. “When my dad finally comes, Sabina and I have swum around the world a few times. My dad is like the trees. In the winter he pretends to be dead. Then he is reborn in the summer,” Zoe says.
The final book, “Swim Team” by Johnnie Christmas, is a comic book about a girl named Bree. In the book, she moves to a new school where she is forced to do the elective Swim 101. In the comic, Bree faces one of her biggest fears: water.
Bree’s neighbor, Etta, is a former swim champion, and she teaches Bree how to swim. “Swimming is joyful, but what swimming looks like in America reflects the history of pools and beaches as white-dominated spaces of privilege and exclusion, especially for Black Americans. Christmas brings all this to rich life in Etta, whose complicated girlhood as a Black swimmer motivates Bree,” said Bonnie Tsui, a journalist in the New York Times.
Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/29/books/review/johnnie-christmas-swim-team.html
