Happy Monday, everyone! I’m technically working for a few hours today to help my library clear out some books in the drop bin over the long weekend. Hopefully I can go at a time when I can get the most done so there isn’t a lot to check in on Tuesday morning. We will see, though.

Thanks to Dini @ Dini Panda Reads, I’m adding Goodreads Monday to my weekly meme schedule, and I’m excited to do this one. This weekly meme was started by @Lauren’s Page Turners and it invites you to pick a book from your TBR and explain why you want to read it.

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.

This is definitely a cover pick for me, but the more I read the synopsis and think about it, the more I would be down to read it. I love historical fiction, and honestly I know that I need to read more so I’m tempted to find this one when I can. I feel like there isn’t much for me to say about this one because I’m not wanting to read any reviews yet. Yep, I know this one was a short post, sorry about that.

I do also love when historical fiction has dual POVs and switches between time periods. I don’t know what it is about it, but it’s one of my favorites when it happens. This one doesn’t happen between too far of a time period, looking like it’s only twenty years between periods, where as some of them can be between forty and longer. Don’t get me wrong: twenty years is a lot of time, as someone who is only thirty years old, I can’t believe that I’ve been alive for as long as I have been. But it’s still not as much time as forty, something that I can’t even imagine right now.

I wonder what secrets they are both hiding, and what Ms. St. James wants with Ella.

Okay for some reason now I want to watch Pretty Little Liars again. I definitely liked the show better than the books, although to be honest I don’t remember much of the books. And I know I didn’t read a lot of them. PLL was a wild show, I don’t know how all of the adults didn’t realize something was wrong. Anyway, have you heard of Wade in the Water? Have you read it yet? Do you know anyone who has? Let me know your thoughts!