A story so poignant, gripping and lyrical, resonant with the emotional urgency of Alice Walker's classics and the poignant charm of Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, Wade in the Water tells the layered story of a friendship that develops between Ella, a 12 year-old precocious and mistreated black girl who sees God in the clouds, and Katherine St. James, a mysterious, strikingly well-dressed white woman who arrives in rural Mississippi in the early 80s.
Wade in the Water adeptly weaves fiction with historical fact to tell the story of two traumatized people whose pasts still haunt them that are drawn together in a complicated friendship. Ella has her secrets, but she desperately wants to be loved and Katherine St. James's arrival sets in motion a chain of events that ripples through both the black and white sides of the divided town of Ricksville, Mississippi. Soon Ella is willing to risk everything to keep Katherine in the town, even as she pushes at Katherine's carefully constructed boundaries that guard a complicated past, with secrets that could have devastating consequences. Told in two voices, Ella's and Katherine St. James, this page-turner will have readers entranced, moved and unable to put it down until the very last page.
Literary Fiction
Told in two voices, Ella’s and Ms. St. James’s, and set around richly developed characters, this riveting, page turning coming of age story will keep readers entranced until the last shocking revelation.
Resonant with the emotional urgency of Alice Walker's classic Meridian and the poignant charm of Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees , a gripping debut novel of female power and vulnerability, race, and class that explores the unlikely friendship between a precocious black girl and a mysterious white woman in a small Mississippi town in the early 1980s.
Eleven-year-old Ella lives in the racially divided town of Ricksville, Mississippi, not far from where the Freedom Summer Murders occurred. Too smart for her own good, she loves God, Mr. Macabe, and Nate, the tough owner of the local diner. To her perpetually irritated Ma, and Leroy, her mother's lover, Ella is an unwanted nuisance.
But Ella pays them no mind. She has a precious secret, and she isn't telling.
One day, a sharply dressed, well-to-do white woman appears on Ella's street, looking for the girl. The arrival of Ms. St. James puts the Black side of town on edge. Why is this white woman making friends with a little Black girl? Who is she and what does she want? When Ms. St. James begins tutoring Ella, the bond between these two unlikely friends deepens, and soon Ella is willing to risk anything and everything to keep Ms. St. James in a community itching to see her gone.
Like Ella, Ms. St. James has secrets--knowledge she keeps in a black notebook filled with scribbled pages. Secrets that will ultimately come out with devastating consequences.
Alternately told in Ella and Ms. St. James's captivating voices, and moving back and forth in time from the 1960s to the 1980s, Nyaneba Nkrumah's engrossing coming-of-age story explores the search to define ourselves, free from the tangled web of truths and lies we are told--the lies that we tell ourselves, and the historical facts that are told as fiction.
Description:
A story so poignant, gripping and lyrical, resonant with the emotional urgency of Alice Walker's classics and the poignant charm of Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, Wade in the Water tells the layered story of a friendship that develops between Ella, a 12 year-old precocious and mistreated black girl who sees God in the clouds, and Katherine St. James, a mysterious, strikingly well-dressed white woman who arrives in rural Mississippi in the early 80s.
Wade in the Water adeptly weaves fiction with historical fact to tell the story of two traumatized people whose pasts still haunt them that are drawn together in a complicated friendship. Ella has her secrets, but she desperately wants to be loved and Katherine St. James's arrival sets in motion a chain of events that ripples through both the black and white sides of the divided town of Ricksville, Mississippi. Soon Ella is willing to risk everything to keep Katherine in the town, even as she pushes at Katherine's carefully constructed boundaries that guard a complicated past, with secrets that could have devastating consequences.
Told in two voices, Ella's and Katherine St. James, this page-turner will have readers entranced, moved and unable to put it down until the very last page.
Literary Fiction
Told in two voices, Ella’s and Ms. St. James’s, and set around richly developed characters, this riveting, page turning coming of age story will keep readers entranced until the last shocking revelation.
Resonant with the emotional urgency of Alice Walker's classic Meridian and the poignant charm of Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees , a gripping debut novel of female power and vulnerability, race, and class that explores the unlikely friendship between a precocious black girl and a mysterious white woman in a small Mississippi town in the early 1980s.
Eleven-year-old Ella lives in the racially divided town of Ricksville, Mississippi, not far from where the Freedom Summer Murders occurred. Too smart for her own good, she loves God, Mr. Macabe, and Nate, the tough owner of the local diner. To her perpetually irritated Ma, and Leroy, her mother's lover, Ella is an unwanted nuisance.
But Ella pays them no mind. She has a precious secret, and she isn't telling.
One day, a sharply dressed, well-to-do white woman appears on Ella's street, looking for the girl. The arrival of Ms. St. James puts the Black side of town on edge. Why is this white woman making friends with a little Black girl? Who is she and what does she want? When Ms. St. James begins tutoring Ella, the bond between these two unlikely friends deepens, and soon Ella is willing to risk anything and everything to keep Ms. St. James in a community itching to see her gone.
Like Ella, Ms. St. James has secrets--knowledge she keeps in a black notebook filled with scribbled pages. Secrets that will ultimately come out with devastating consequences.
Alternately told in Ella and Ms. St. James's captivating voices, and moving back and forth in time from the 1960s to the 1980s, Nyaneba Nkrumah's engrossing coming-of-age story explores the search to define ourselves, free from the tangled web of truths and lies we are told--the lies that we tell ourselves, and the historical facts that are told as fiction.