It is Christmas holiday time in Australia, and here is the first of several beach reads I hope to do. I picked this one up at Orchard Bookshop in the heart of Adelaide Arcade, with a voucher that was a gift from family members.
MY THOUGHTS:
The two authors, Gale and Weetman, aimed to write an interesting YA Aussie timeslip tale. The setting is Sydney, featuring Wylie's Baths, a terrific tidal swimming pool still open to the public. Perhaps the title might more accurately be Elsewhen Girls, yet it wouldn't sound as good.
13-year-old Catherine (Cat) Feeney, attends Victoria Grammar School on a swimming scholarship in 2021. She's fast and talented, but having her future set with such rigid boundaries makes her rebellious. Cat's not convinced she has the dogged passion to aim for the Olympics. Fanny (Fan) Durack is an older teen in 1908. She's a strong swimmer who has set her heart on training for the Olympics but must squeeze it in around household chores. Her parents are pub managers, and Fanny and her siblings work flat out helping with hands-on work that never ends.
The main twist is that one protagonist is drawn straight from history. Fanny was a real person, along with every member of her family.
The timeslip catalyst is an ornate stopwatch coupled with a perfectly synchronized swim 113 years apart. It's a body swap story as well. Not only must they bluff their way through each day, but they must do it in each others' skins and try to fool each others' families rather than risk being thought crazy.
Cat is appalled by the limitations placed on women in 1908. 'I can't believe washing sheets comes before everything else a girl might want to do.' Fan's head is totally turned by all our 21st-century labor-saving devices and fast food. 'I keep imagining what Ma would do with all the spare time.' (This begs the questions, what do we do? How would we justify to a person from the earliest 20th century that we still consider ourselves time poor with way too much on our plates?)
Although Fan quickly appreciates how much easier she finds life in the 2020s, I'd argue that Cat's plight might still be far preferable in other ways. Technological bafflement is real. We surely all have at least vague inklings of the olden days from TV and books. Cat's instructions to, 'check the copper' might be more intuitive than Fan's being told to, 'Google it on your laptop.'
I found one sad oversight. Fanny Durack, from her vantage point in 2021, never discovers that not only did she win Olympic Gold, she was destined to become the world's greatest female swimmer across all distances for a period of time. If Gale and Weetman intended to incorporate a real-life celebrity into their fiction, at least they might have done her a favor similar to the memorable Dr Who episode with Vincent Van Gogh. They could have written it in so easily.
It's nice to see them mention in their endnotes such inspirations as Charlotte Sometimes and Playing Beatie Bow. This book doesn't have the melancholic atmosphere of Charlotte Sometimes. It's fairly upbeat for such a puzzling swap, but at least the authors give equal airplay to both Cat and Fan's experiences, while Penelope Farmer's classic focuses solely on Charlotte, completely omitting poor Clare's bewilderment. And the mysterious family prophecies in Playing Beatie Bow gives Ruth Park's work an urgency this book lacks.
Overall, I think the swimming venues have more depth than the story itself, but it's still a fun, quick read.
🌟🌟🌟½
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