The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store: A Novel

I felt like there were way too many characters and back stories. In the end they connected but took a long winding way to get there and I lost interest alive the way

Beautiful story - particularly poignant now.

What I Liked: Nada. Only finished the book because it was for book club. The story was all over the place with 75 different characters each having a weird backstory that was randomly introduced in the middle of someone else's random backstory. What I Disliked: Offensive frequent use of the derogatory term "Yid" for Jews. Racist and antisemitic language is not appropriate for a book published in 2023! Shame on the National Book Award, Oprah, and Barack Obama for awarding/praising/promoting this book.

A weak ★★★★☆ for me. The setting & stories are interesting, but in the end the whole thing felt needlessly complicated. Not only did I feel like there were ends left untied, but truthfully, I wasn’t even sure what all the ends were at that point. I’m OK with an open, unresolved ending, but this was just a mess. Overall, as I expect from McBride, there were some well-drawn characters and a lot of quirky, interesting texture to the insular society of Chicken Hill (and its environs). And if it were compelling enough to make me read it again, I’d probably be able to untangle a lot of what’s going on at the end. But I really doubt I’ll be doing that, so instead it’s just a really unsatisfying conclusion to an otherwise good book.
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The more I think about this book, the less impressed I am; I’ve dropped my rating down to ★★★☆☆.

Hard for me to follow at some places but then it took off and I wanted to continue to follow through. He knows how to connect readers to his characters