Eleven-year-old Ella is growing up in the Black neighborhood of Ricksville, Mississippi, a small, racially divided town. The year is 1982, and the town still harbors harsh memories of the 1964 Freedom Summer murders of three civil rights activists in nearby Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Ella is precocious and desperate to be loved. Unfortunately, affection is in short supply in her family. Ella is the middle child, but it’s an open secret that she has a different father than her siblings. She’s the product of an affair, but that’s all she knows about her birth father. Her stepfather alternately ignores her and threatens to sexually abuse her. Both her siblings and her classmates mock her for her parentage.

"In WADE IN THE WATER, debut novelist Nyani Nkrumah evocatively explores issues of family origins, racial identity, colorism, loyalty and white saviorism."

Ella is lonely, ashamed of how much darker she is than her siblings, and longing for a father. Is it any wonder that when beautiful, intelligent Ms. St. James moves to town and shows genuine interest in her, she becomes infatuated? As a single white woman, Ms. St. James stirs up no shortage of controversy by moving into a house on the Black side of Ricksville. She has come to town to conduct research for her degree at Princeton University, and Ella soon helps by introducing her to her new neighbors so she can interview them for her project.

However, as readers learn early on and Ella eventually discovers, Ms. St. James is not entirely a stranger to these parts. She grew up nearby and moved to Boston with her family when she was about Ella’s age. Through a parallel narrative about Ms. St. James’ early years, her background is revealed to be sufficiently more complicated --- and her motivations for returning to Mississippi might be called into question as a result. But regardless of her motives, Ella flourishes under her affections. At least at first.

In WADE IN THE WATER, debut novelist Nyani Nkrumah evocatively explores issues of family origins, racial identity, colorism, loyalty and white saviorism. In the sections she narrates, Ella reveals herself to be perceptive, inquisitive and, eventually, joyful in the face of everything she has learned and experienced. Nkrumah also imagines a fully realized Black community that harbors its fair share of distrust and hypocrisy but also finds ways to nurture young Ella when it counts. The novel’s setting offers a vivid reminder of the ways in which segregation and racially motivated violence persisted long after the official end of Jim Crow.