The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store: A Novel
From James McBride, author of the bestselling Oprah's Book Club pick Deacon King Kong and the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird, a novel about small-town secrets and the people who keep them
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe's theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.
As these characters' stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town's white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community--heaven and earth--that sustain us.
Bringing his masterly storytelling skills and his deep faith in humanity to The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride has written a novel as compassionate as Deacon King Kong and as inventive as The Good Lord Bird.
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Community Reviews
What’s it about?
This novel opens in 1972 in Pottstown, Pennsylvania when construction workers discover an old skeleton that must have been buried long ago. The skeleton is found in a neighborhood that used to be called Chicken Hill. A neighborhood where newly immigrated Jews and African Americans lived side by side. This story mainly takes place 40 years earlier when Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived in Chicken Hill and owned the Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. Slowly the story unfolds and we understand just who that skeleton belongs to and how it ended up there.
What did it make me think about?
How hard it is to live in the margins.
Should I read it?
I have such respect and admiration for James McBride’s talent- and that was before I read his latest book. This book was my absolute favorite James McBride story! I just loved the characters he created in this one. Moshe, Chona, Nate, Addie, Dodo, Monkey Boy- and so many other characters just jumped off the page for me. Even the characters with smaller roles in the story were so well-drawn. This is a must read for 2023! And when you turn the last page- read the acknowledgments for a whole new level of admiration. Don’t miss this one!
Quote-
“Chona had never been one to play by the rules of American society. She did not experience the world as most people did. To her, the world was not a china closet where you admire this and don’t touch that. Rather, she saw it as a place where every act of living was a chance for tikkum olum, to improve the world. The tiny woman with the bad foot was all soul. “
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