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, Wade in the Water, tells the story of an unforgettable summer in 1982 seen largely through the eyes of Ella, a young, mistreated, black 11 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 her, Ella and Katherine St. James are drawn into a complicated friendship that drowns out the outside world.... until it doesn't, and the relationship grows increasingly fraught as Ella unwittingly pushes against Katherine St. James's carefully constructed boundaries that guard a complicated past, with secrets that could have devastating consequences. Narrated by both Ella and Katherine St. James, this moving coming of age story, replete with heartache and love, cruelty, madness and laughter, is an exquisite and explosive coming of age tale that will keep you spell-bound until the very last page.