The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store: A Novel

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

This is a very character-driven story about a mixed community consisting of African Americas and immigrant Jewish people living together and navigating the landscape of bigotry/religion/race, class, gender, disability and otherness. The writing is so rich and descriptive. The character development is deep and vivid, giving us a lot of insight into how each person thinks and feels. However, at times these tangential forays into the innermost workings of the characters were distracting to me from the story. It's as if the story was just an excuse to write about a bunch of interesting people but was not really the point... maybe that's exactly what it was...

Some books get recommended so much and so often you just have to pick them up. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride is exactly one of those seminal titles. Set in the 1930s in Chicken Hill, a diverse neighborhood where Jewish immigrants and African Americans live side by side. The story revolves around Chona Ludlow, a Jewish woman who runs a local grocery store, and her efforts to protect Dodo, a deaf Black boy, from being institutionalized by local authorities. Through themes of community, resistance, and moral courage, McBride weaves a tale of solidarity and survival amidst racial and societal tensions. This novel covers a lot of generational, cultural, political, and racial trauma. McBride does not attempt to heal or those traumas or even say they have gotten better. He does speak to how we have always had salves of one sort or another to manage those struggles. McBride paints with brush strokes that color in the past, future, and in between in a way that is more impressionist that realist. In some ways leaning into tropes and in others calling them out. The goal is to give the reader a sense of a time and place that repeated itself across America with slightly different aspects of the story. The cultural blending of Black, Jewish, Native, and other cultures into a tapestry of an emerging America was most interesting. McBride spends extra time to show how almost every minority ethnic group spends time in the “other” column before someday blurring into the larger homogeneous “they.” All except for those black and brown bodies whose history of racial traumas and continued other-ification may never let them become fully “American.” McBride also pulls the story all the way forward to present-day with careful allusions to our current issues with gun violence, politics, and similar topics. McBride’s style is like a home cooked meal; rich and filling. The kind of food you sit down and discuss deep topics to. You don’t finish thinking your problems are solved but that you are all the better for facing the truth head on and taking steps towards a better tomorrow. The way he portrays love and mystery between characters is well grounded in how so much of human connection is implied and unspoken. McBride’s character development is solid and he connects the simple and complex story points using these characters with solid through lines. I am all the better for reading this one and feel safe adding one more must-read recommendation to it.

One of those rare books that I'd rate a ten. A fine character study and a tale of oppression and exceptionalism in the US that hasn't changed that much in the 90 or so years since the story takes place