The sweetest thing

In 1930s Atlanta, Perri Singleton's life at the elite Washington Seminary is one of tea dances, debut parties, and an enviable social calendar — until a family tragedy upends everything she's always taken for granted. Around the same time, Mary "Dobbs" Dillard, the daughter of an itinerant preacher, arrives from inner-city Chicago to live with her aunt and attend the same school, determined to reform its worldly young ladies and set the world right.

The two girls' lives intersect at the point of Perri's crisis, forging a friendship neither expected. As Dobbs tries to shore up Perri's faith, she finds her own convictions starting to waver, and both girls are drawn into a mystery that touches on the social and racial fault lines of the segregated South just as the Great Depression begins to close in on Atlanta's elite.