A 12-year-old girl living in Jim Crow South Carolina is bullied for her light skin tone before an invitation to spend Christmas with her jazz-singer mother in Boston reveals her family's unlikely history. A first novel. 25,000 first printing. Simultaneous eBook., Eleven-year-old Ella seeks information about her father while enjoying a visit with her mother, a jazz singer, in Boston in 1944, then returns to the harsh realities of segregated, small-town South Carolina.