Nearly everything important in twelve-year-old Gabriella’s life that summer of 1957 can be traced to the river. On the North Carolina military base where she lives, she meets the African-American Marine Hawkins by the river’s brown-green water. When her father, the general, treats her as if she doesn’t exist, Gabriella’s determined to show him she’s good at something: she’ll learn to swim. And it’s the river with its mysterious worlds that leads to her mother, even though Maria Winter doesn’t want to be found. At the river, Gabriella discovers Hawkins is far more than a servant in the kitchen of her father’s quarters. He becomes her swim coach and a person she can talk with—even about the tragedy of the youth Emmett Till. The fourteen-year-old was lynched two years earlier, his body thrown into Mississippi’s Tallahatchie river. But this river, her river, isn’t a place of death. Emmett’s spirit is alive in its waters. It’s a place of magic. At the river she works with Hawkins on her swimming so she can enter a competition and make her father proud. Then maybe the general won’t send her north to school for another lonely year. At the river Hawkins helps her find her strength. Emmett helps her find her heart. Emmett had been murdered for whistling at a white woman. Could her friendship with Hawkins endanger the tough Marine? It doesn’t seem possible. Until a sudden storm on the river changes Gabriella’s life—forever.