Trudy’s Big Swim: How Gertrude Ederle Swam the English Channel and Took the World by Storm

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.)