The Mermaid Queen, Shana Corey, andSome Art That’ll Really Wake You Up

Heres swimmer, film star, fashion trend-setter, and the first woman to attempt to swim the English Channel, Annette Kellerman, slicing through the waterwinning races and setting records. Have you all seen the fabulous new picture book biography about Kellerman and her derring-do? Perhaps you read Betsy Birds review of it last week. I love this book, and Im here on this Nonfiction Monday to welcome the author, Shana Corey, who is going to talk a bit about the book and her work. Shana, as she writes in the books Authors Note, has always been interested in women and girls brave enough to make waves. And Ive got some fabulous art from the title to show as well  with fingers crossed that illustrator Edwin Fotheringham will soon be sending me his responses to my illustrator-interview questionnaire and then we can hear more from him, too. If you saw his work in last years What to Do About Alice?: How Alice Roosevelt Broke the Rules, Charmed the World, and Drove Her Father Teddy Crazy! by Barbara Kerley, then you know how exuberant Fotheringhams highly stylized illustrations are. (If youre like me and havent had your seven impossible cups of coffee before breakfast yet, Edwins art will wake up DIRECTLY.) Coreys Mermaid Queen (Scholastic, April 2009) is the story of Kellerman, born in 1886 in Sydney, Australia. Annette, as a child, had to wear leg braces (probably from rickets, Shana writes), but later she learned to swim and, as noted above, set many records. She began her swimming career at a time when women athletes were far from respected. But, believing swimming was the most superior sport, Annette kept at it and also spoke out against the constraining (to say the very least) ladies bathing costumes of that time. Once, when wearing a boys swimsuit at Londons Bath Club, she caused quite the stir and eventually sewed stockings onto the suit, a moment from her life included in Mermaid Queen  and done so dramatically and to great effect. Also included is the scene at Boston Harbor in the summer of 1908, which you can see here, in which Annette was arrested for indecency for not wearing a dress-and-pantaloon swimsuit, popular during that time. (more&)