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A Novel
by James McBride
Book Reviewed by: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?...
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
(780 words)
(Reviewed by Abby Edgecumbe).
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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