The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
James McBride · 2023
A Black and Jewish community in 1930s Pottstown, Pennsylvania protect a deaf Black child from the state. McBride's novel is warm, funny, generous, and quietly devastating; a portrait of solidarity between marginalized communities written with the grace of a master storyteller.
The case against
McBride opens with a skeleton in a well, then wanders away from it for two hundred pages of backstory and town gossip. The cast sprawls, threads dangle, and the warmth occasionally thickens into folksiness. If you need plot to pull you forward, this one will test you; it runs on voice and charm alone.
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