{"id":2095,"date":"2012-07-26T06:28:57","date_gmt":"2012-07-26T06:28:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=2095"},"modified":"2012-10-27T06:45:09","modified_gmt":"2012-10-27T06:45:09","slug":"wonder-girls-by-catherine-jones-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=2095","title":{"rendered":"Wonder Girls by Catherine Jones"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Published by Simon & Schuster 7 June 2012<\/strong><\/p>\n

416pp, hardback, \u00a312.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Elsbeth Lindner<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u2018\u201cI\u2019m sure that one\u2019s a girl,\u201d Ida said, pulling her towel round her shoulders.<\/p>\n

\u2018A boy shook his head. \u201cDon\u2019t be daft,\u201d he replied. \u201cHow can it be a girl in a plane?\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 1928 and most women\u2019s lives are narrow and earthbound, whether lived in the USA or a provincial corner of the United Kingdom. When Amelia Earheart\u2019s record-busting seaplane lands off the coast of west Wales, there\u2019s one swimmer in the water to see it at first hand: Ida Gaze, whose ambition to swim the Bristol Channel would, if successfully done, similarly break records for endurance and female achievement.<\/p>\n

Catherine Jones\u2019s substantial period saga is bursting with nostalgia for the lidos of pre-war England and Wales, for the glasses of Dandelion and Burdock raised at a birthday celebration, the gob stoppers, pussy-bow blouses and Bakelite hairclips. But it\u2019s more than an attractively-researched story of heroic physical achievement. It\u2019s also an exploration of undeclared love. And it uses Ida\u2019s amazing swim across one of the most treacherous spans of water in the UK as a springboard to recall those not-so-distant decades when conventions crumbled and women pushed forward.<\/p>\n

Ida and her close friend Freda Voyle shock the gossipy citizens of their Welsh town (modeled on Penarth) with their taste for trousers and red lipstick. Freda has been told she might be a nurse, but not a doctor. And Ida\u2019s ambition is roundly dismissed until she achieves it and then becomes, briefly, a local icon. The \u2018Wonder Girls\u2019 refuse to be confined by prudery and narrow expectation. They quit \u2018the sly unkindness\u2019 of the town and move to London, where they discover careers, but also grow apart. Their lives, trajectories and emotions are pieced together in interwoven timelines that reach up to the twenty-first century.<\/p>\n

Along the way, Jones includes glimpses of other wonder girls \u2013 Earheart of course, but also Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel, in 1926. In an afterword she pays homage to the real-life Wonder Girls, first and foremost Kathleen Thomas on whom Ida is based and who swam the Bristol Channel in 1927.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s these roots in real exceptionalism that give the book\u00a0its edge, although themes of unfulfilled love and potential, and of long-held loyalty between women,\u00a0also sustain\u00a0its thorough-going readability.<\/p>\n

Forget the era of Lycra, of aero-dynamic body sculpting and wicking fabrics in which \u2013 this summer in particular \u2013 we are drowning. Jones returns us to a time when bathing suits were made of wool and, for women, breaking a record wasn\u2019t the end of the story. Guts and stamina were essential but so was a kind of determination, in the teeth of prevailing social opinion, that thankfully today seems scarcely imaginable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Elsbeth Lindner<\/p>\n

Ida and her close friend Freda Voyle shock the gossipy citizens of their Welsh town (modeled on Penarth) with their taste for trousers and red lipstick. Freda has been told she might be a nurse, but not a doctor. And Ida\u2019s ambition is roundly dismissed until she achieves it and then becomes, briefly, a local icon. The \u2018Wonder Girls\u2019 refuse to be confined by prudery and narrow expectation. They quit \u2018the sly unkindness\u2019 of the town and move to London, where they discover careers, but also grow apart[…] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2095"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2095\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3011,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2095\/revisions\/3011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}