Nkrumah, Nyani
 
ISBN 9780063226623, 0063226626
Paperback | 320 pages
 
Wade in the Water tells the story of an unforgettable summer in 1982 seen largely through the eyes of Ella, a young, mistreated, Black eleven-year-old girl who lives with Leroy, who resents her, and Ma, who cannot stand to look at her. Ella’s world is changed when Katherine St. James, a mysterious white researcher from Princeton, arrives in their racially divided Mississippi town.
 
The community is immediately suspicious—what does Katherine want, and why is she really there? As tensions mount and rumors swirl, and the tide swings against Katherine, she and Ella are drawn into a complicated friendship that silences the outside world . . . until it doesn’t. Soon, the relationship grows increasingly fraught as Ella unwittingly pushes against Katherine’s carefully constructed boundaries that guard a complicated past, with secrets that could have devastating consequences. Told in the lyrical voices of both Ella and Katherine St. James, this moving coming-of-age story, replete with heartache and love, cruelty and laughter, is an exquisite and explosive novel that will keep you spellbound until the last page.