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Summary and Reviews of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

A Novel

by James McBride
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  • First Published:
  • Aug 8, 2023, 400 pages
  • Reviewed by BookBrowse Book Reviewed by:
    Abby Edgecumbe
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About This Book

Book Summary

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.

1

The Hurricane

There was an old Jew who lived at the site of the old synagogue up on Chicken Hill in the town of Pottstown, Pa., and when Pennsylvania State Troopers found the skeleton at the bottom of an old well off Hayes Street, the old Jew's house was the first place they went to. This was in June 1972, the day after a developer tore up the Hayes Street lot to make way for a new townhouse development.

We found a belt buckle and a pendant in the well, the cops said, and some old threads—from a red costume or jacket, that's what the lab shows.

They produced a piece of jewelry, handed it to him, and asked what it was.

A mezuzah, the old man said.

It matches the one on the door, the cops said. Don't these things belong on doors?

The old man shrugged. Jewish life is portable, he said.

The inscription on the back says "Home of the Greatest Dancer in the World." It's in Hebrew. You speak Hebrew?

Do I look like I speak Swahili?

Answer the question. You speak Hebrew or not?...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!
  1. In The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride takes readers into the lives of the people who live on Chicken Hill, a neighborhood of "ramshackle houses and dirt roads where the town's Blacks, Jews, and immigrant whites who couldn't afford any better lived." As you read about Chicken Hill, how did you envision it? Did its description prompt memories of places that you've lived or recall from your past?
  2. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is owned by Moshe Ludlow and his wife, Chona, who runs it, and it's the center of neighborhood life. Are there places like that from your own life or in your past? How are they similar to (or different from) the Heaven & Earth?
  3. Moshe desegregated the local theater by booking Black ...
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Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

One of the most compelling elements of McBride's writing is its interconnectedness. The finale is a thrilling, Rube-Goldberg-esque sequence of events that culminates in a near perfect ending. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store shows readers that it is possible to connect with people who are radically different from you without relinquishing the things unique to your own experience. Love bursts from the pages of McBride's novel, shining its golden light on the miracles we can accomplish as a community...continued

Full Review Members Only (780 words)

(Reviewed by Abby Edgecumbe).

Media Reviews

Booklist (starred review)
Funny, tender, knockabout, gritty, and suspenseful, McBride's microcosmic, socially critiquing, and empathic novel dynamically celebrates difference, kindness, ingenuity, and the force that compels us to move heaven and earth to help each other.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
[A] boisterous hymn to community, mercy, and karmic justice...The interlocking destinies of these and other characters make for tense, absorbing drama and, at times, warm, humane comedy. McBride's well-established skill with narrative tactics may sometimes spill toward the melodramatic here. But as in McBride's previous works, you barely notice...because of the depth of characterizations and the pitch-perfect dialogue...If it's possible for America to have a poet laureate, why can't James McBride be its storyteller-in-chief?

Library Journal (starred review)
McBride ends the novel with so much poignancy and heartfelt sympathy for his characters that readers will be hard-pressed not to be moved. A compelling novel, compellingly written, and not to be missed.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)
[V]ibrant...McBride's pages burst with life, whether in descriptions of Moshe's dance hall, where folks get down to Chick Webb's 'gorgeous, stomping, low-down, rip-roaring, heart-racing jazz,' or a fortune teller who dances and cries out to God before registering her premonitions on a typewriter. This endlessly rich saga highlights the different ways in which people look out for one another.

Real Simple
A stunning page turner…and an utterly captivating, compassionate story.

Ron Charles, The Washington Post
We all need—we all deserve—this vibrant, love-affirming novel that bounds over any difference that claims to separate us.

Time Magazine
Heartfelt and engrossing…an ode to the power of community in the face of oppression.

Danez Smith, The New York Times Book Review
A murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel ... Charming, smart, heart-blistering, and heart-healing.

Reader Reviews

Becky H

excellent writing
THE HEAVEN AND EARTH GROCERY STORE by James McBride Heartwarming and yet filled with the frailties of humans is my one sentence comment on this book. HEAVEN AND EARTH tells the story of the town of Pottstown, Pennsylvania in the 1920’s and the ...   Read More
Anthony Conty

Pennsylvania History Made Universal
Pennsylvania history shapes the ethnic neighborhoods of today, and books like 'The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store' by James McBride serve as a poignant reminder of their origins. In a state as vast as Pennsylvania, countless stories exist for the ...   Read More
Cathryn Conroy

A Masterpiece of Genius: A Story About the Bonds of Community and the Grace of Diversity
This book by James McBride is a masterpiece of genius, a story about the bonds of community, the grace of diversity, and the blessings of caring for one another. That said, it is not an easy book to read, especially in the beginning. There are a ...   Read More
Margot P

Takes a Village
While there certainly is a cast of characters in this novel, McBride masterfully brings their souls alive to the reader with limited words. While primarily a tale of the struggles faced by the Jewish and Black communities in rural pre-war ...   Read More

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Beyond the Book



Conditions for People with Disabilities in 1930s America

James McBride's novel The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store follows a community as they work together to save a young deaf Black boy, Dodo, from unjust institutionalization in 1930s America. Though Dodo's disability is physical, the state authorities are determined to place him in a mental institution called Pennhurst. In the context of American history, this was not an uncommon phenomenon. The conditions for mentally and physically impaired people in the 1930s were poor to say the least, and McBride put special care into investigating this issue in his novel. Speaking to Scott Detrow of NPR, the author states, "I was always fascinated with the idea about how these kids who are, quote-unquote, 'disabled' end up in insane asylums in the early ...

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Read-Alikes

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