Nyani Nkrumah and Wade in the Water

Mon Mar 27 7 - 8 pm Miller Register at bit.ly/AuthorNyaniNkrumah in the flesh, healthy, sun-tanned, and thirty years old. Katy doesn’t understand what is happening, or how—all she can focus on is that she has somehow, impossibly, gotten her mother back. Over the course of one Italian summer, Katy gets to know Carol, not as her mother, but as the young woman before her.

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, this gripping debut novel of female power and vulnerability, race, and class explores the unlikely friendship between a precocious black girl and a mysterious white woman in a small Mississippi town in the early 1980s.

Nyani Nkrumah was born in Boston and grew up in Ghana, West Africa, and later Zimbabwe. Nyani graduated from Amherst College, has a Masters from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and earned a Ph.D from Cornell University. A Fulbright Fellow, she lives in the Washington, DC area with her family and works in international development.

Serle is an author and television writer who lives in New York and Los Angeles. Serle co-developed the hit TV adaptation of her YA series Famous in Love, and is also the author of The Dinner List, The Edge of Falling and When You Were Mine. She received her MFA from the New School in New York City.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)