SuitabookLily and the Rockets
Rebecca Stevens
- Reading
- Consider reading alongside a short conversation about fairness in sport and changing rules. Pause around the war’s end, when opportunities alter, and invite the reader to distinguish historical attitudes from the book’s treatment of Lily’s choices.
- Themes
- Girls’ access to football: Lily and other factory workers form a women’s football team, while football authorities later declare women’s football unsuitable and restrict access to grounds. The restriction is presented as an unfair barrier to the girls’ sporting ambitions.
- Work and wartime change: Women enter munitions work during the war, then lose jobs when the war ends and men return to the workforce. The book leaves its stance open to more than one reading.
- Persistence and self-realisation: Lily wants to become a goalkeeper and continues pursuing football when the Rockets’ opportunities are threatened. Lily’s persistence is treated as central to her personal journey, although the consequences of her choices are not fully known.
- Worth knowing
- The wartime setting includes ammunition work, dangerous physical conditions and the loss of employment and football after the war. Lily’s family circumstances, friendship, romance and emotional highs and lows also merit attention.