Elsewhere girls by Emily Gale & Nova Weetman

Emily Gale and Nova Weetman are two Melbourne authors who are friends. In an unusual collaboration, they have written a book where alternate chapters refer to one or other of the two main characters - Cat and Fanny. Who wrote which character is for the reader to guess. In the acknowledgements Gale and Weetman explain that they wrote the book chapter by chapter and sent them ..."back and forth like letters." Both writers appeal to the junior and young adult female reader. Elsewhere Girls, like Weetman's Sick Bay and The Edge of Thirteen, will be in hot demand with our girls aged 10+ as the content is comforting as they experience the issues and concerns of adolescence.  

Elsewhere Girls is a timeslip novel, somewhat reminiscent of Ruth Parks's Playing Beatie Bow. Cat is a contemporary 2021 girl who has won a swimming scholarship which has brought her family from rural Orange to Sydney. She is ambivalent about her future as a swimmer. Fanny is based on the real Sarah Frances Durack who had to fight hard for women's rights to swim in the Olympics. Subsequently she became the first Australian woman to win Olympic gold.

The two girls live over two hundred years apart in time but in a strange, mysterious twist they find themselves in the other's time zone and body. Both girls have to adjust to the time slip, body swap, family swap and life swap. Both must maintain the pretence of being the other. Weetman and Gale have managed to present both eras extremely authentically. The story is narrated by Cat and Fanny so the reader experiences their inner thoughts. The characters in Elsewhere Girls are well rounded. The reader feels the intensity of the emotions of the two main protagonists as they try to negotiate life in their new time zone. The family members are warm and realistically representative of the times in which they live. The minutiae of the detail in the setting, the technologies, the clothes and the language is captured well by both authors. There are awkward moments, funny moments, unexpected challenges - all very reassuring to read about when you are a similar age.

The friendship difficulties, rivalries and the business of physically and emotionally growing into womanhood, though presenting different challenges to the two girls who are living lives that are two centuries apart, still have a universal resonance and this is what attracts our young female readers to books like Elsewhere Girls and authors like Weetman and Gale.

Themes: Timeslip, Sydney, Swimming competitions, Women's rights, Girls' friendships.

Wendy Jeffrey