Wade in the Water

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.