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Happy Mommy Recommends:
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store
By James McBride
Novelist James McBride is also an accomplished jazz musician, and it shows in his latest literary gem, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. The unfolding of the plot is excellently paced, never slowing down for too long, always keeping the reader engaged with a steady rhythm. Dialogue is sometimes delivered in sudden bursts of staccato, while other characters have a rich and musical cadence to their speaking. The novel opens in the year 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, find a skeleton at the bottom of a well while digging the foundation of a new development. The novel then travels back in time to the Depression era, where we meet residents of Pennsylvania’s Chicken Hill, a rundown neighborhood where Jewish immigrants and African Americans live side by side. We are then invited to tag along as McBride takes his time revealing how the skeleton got there and to whom it belonged. In this age of increasing divisiveness and racial intolerance, McBride reminds us to strive always for equality, even despite history’s cyclical nature and our collective prejudices. It’s a beautifully composed novel with unforgettable characters shaped as much by their individual differences as by their longing for connection with others. McBride is a writer for these troubled times, finding more than a shred of decency in humanity, even as he holds us accountable for our dearth of tolerance.