Sep 17

Sep 17 The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

Author: James McBride
Publisher: Riverhead
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

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.

As these characters' stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins 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.

TL;DR Review

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store is absolutely going to be one of my favorite reads of the year. Somehow, It’s both heavy and feels like a big literary hug at the same time. McBride, I’m coming for your backlist!

For you if: You are looking for a cast of characters to love so fiercely that you’d gladly fight anyone who hurts them.

Full Review

I’ve always wanted to read James McBride, but I just never quite got to him. Well, I’m here now — and oh, how I loved this book! It will be on my list of favorites for the year for sure. Add me to the list of people who bow down to McBride’s raw talent.

The book starts in Pottstown, PA in the 1970s, when police have found a skeleton at the bottom of a well. It flashes back to the 1930s, and we meet the people of the Chicken Hill neighborhood, where Jewish immigrants and Black people live side by side. Among them is Moshe, who owns a theatre that (boldly) welcomes Black performers, and his wife Chona, who is fierce and big-hearted and runs the grocery store almost entirely on credit (which she doesn’t track). When a local deaf boy named Dodo loses his parents and the state tries to institutionalize him, the community comes together to hide him.

There’s a very specific feeling that I often get from fantasy novels but rarely (if ever) from literary fiction, and that is this: “If anyone harms a single hair on these precious characters’ heads, I will fight them.” I cannot believe how much I felt for these people — especially as McBride spends so much time bouncing from tertiary character to tertiary character, introducing us to the entire community through so many eyes.

In fact, that sweeping approach to narration is one of the things that makes this book feel very clearly influenced by Toni Morrison. The other is the rhythm and cadence McBride uses in his sentences. While nobody will ever write sentences like Morrison, there is still a distinctly Morrison-like feeling to them that was especially obvious to me because I listened to large swaths of this book on audio (and I listened to many of Toni Morrison’s books on audio, which she narrates herself, as well). Kudos to voice actor Dominic Hoffman who pulls on this thread wonderfully.

There’s so much more I could say here, but this is getting long. I’ll leave you with my awe over the fact that this book manages to be so heavy (plenty of TWs here) and also feel like a big literary hug; it’s incredible. As is the way McBride shows us through these characters — the recently arrived and formerly enslaved, all of whom should have hope for a prosperous future were it not for white supremacy — that it’s the power of love and community that sustains us.