Bree, who loves math, is excited to begin school and sign up for the Math Puzzles elective. But when she's told the class is full and she will have to take swimming instead, Bree is completely deflated - she doesn't know how to swim. Meanwhile, she and Clara become best friends. Clara is also a great swimmer and is on the school's competitive swim team, the Enith Brigitha Manatees. After repeatedly skipping swim class, Bree is finally caught and when the reason comes out, her dad signs her up for swimming lessons.
Some girls from her new school's rival swim team, Holyoke Prep, see Bree learning to swim in the kiddy pool, and cruelly make fun of her. Afraid and humiliated, Bree goes from skipping swim class to skipping school altogether. When her math homework falls into the pool at her apartment, Bree jumps in to get it back, and has to be rescued by Ms. Etta. It turns out that Ms. Etta had been a champion swimmer all through school, college and even professionally for a while. Naturally, she offers to teach Bree how to swim.
Meanwhile, the coach of the Enith Brigitha Manatees learns that the pool the team swims in may be turned into a Smoothie Palace and he desperately needs to get more good swimmers on his team to save it. Bree's swimming lessons with Ms. Etta are going well, although Bree is still filled with self-doubt in the water. Ms. Etta is a calm and patient teacher, and even gives Bree a brief but important lesson about why so many Black people don't know how to swim and it has nothing to do with fear of the water, but rather from laws that limited their access to pools.
When Bree makes the team, and then signs up for swimming instead of math her second semester, her father is clearly disappointed, but accepts her decision. He's been pretty busy with his new job and training and keeps missing her meets, which is very disappointing for Bree. Bree is still filled with self-doubt whenever she's in the water, and that isn't made easier when Keisha, one of the girls from Holyoke Prep who made fun of her, transfers to Enith Brigitha after being kicked off the team there for coming in last at a meet. And Clara, whose mother wants her to go to Holyoke Prep, gets a letter saying she has been accepted there and will be transferring at the beginning of the next school year. All this makes for a very disunited team. So, maybe now that Coach has asked Ms. Etta to help with the team, she can bring some unity and help lead the team to victory and saving their pool, and maybe, just maybe, the girls can help Ms. Etta find the missing piece in her own life.
Bree is a wonderful character. She's smart, upbeat, and supportive, then swimming and self-doubt enter her life. Christmas has really captured the kinds of thoughts that go through a person's head in the throes of self-doubt, but he has Bree swim though them more than once, because anyone who has ever doubted themselves about something knows those pesky thoughts don't go away overnight or even necessarily with accomplishment. It was hard to see this sweet girl sink but wonderful to see how she finally met the challenges put in front of her and swam to the surface.
Ms. Etta was also a great character, bringing the past into the present with her own accomplishments and I like that Christmas portrayed her as someone who still had so much to give to the youth of today. And Bree was certainly a catalyst for turning Ms. Etta's life around as much as Ms. Etta did that for Bree. I was a little disappointed in Bree's father's behavior once she joined the swim team, but forgave him when his own deep dark secret finally came out.
Swim Team is definitely a positive, accessible book about family, community, and sportsmanship (in and out of the pool). It does have some social commentary but much of it is subtle. For example, it's Bree's more diverse school that may lose their OK pool, while the mostly white Holyoke Prep has a state of the art pool. The art is simple, but clear and the cells are easy to follow. It reminded me of Jerry Craft's graphic novel New Kid, which I loved and I would definitely pair these two books for a class read.
No comments:
Post a Comment