The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

Starred review from June 26, 2023
National Book Award winner McBride (Deacon King Kong) tells a vibrant tale of Chicken Hill, a working-class neighborhood of Jewish, Black, and European immigrant families in Pottstown, Pa., where the 1972 discovery of a human skeleton unearths events that took place several decades earlier. In 1925, Moshe Ludlow owns the town’s first integrated dance hall and theater with his wife, Chona, a beautiful woman who’s undeterred by her polio-related disability and driven by her deep Jewish faith. Chona also runs the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, where she extends kindness and indefinite credit to her Jewish and Black customers alike. When Nate and Addie Tamblin, friends and employees of the Ludlows who are Black, approach the couple for help keeping their nephew, Dodo, from becoming a ward of the state, Chona doesn’t hesitate to open her home to hide the boy from the authorities. As the racist white “good Christians” from down the hill begin to interfere, claiming to be worried about Dodo’s welfare, a two-fold tragedy occurs that brings the community together to exact justice, which leads to the dead body discovered years later. 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.

June 10, 2024

McBride (Deacon King Kong) opens his latest novel in 1972 with the discovery of an unidentified skeleton in Pottstown, PA. The mystery of who the deceased might have been slowly unweaves through flashbacks to the 1920s and 1930s. Married Jewish couple Moshe and Chona own and live above the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store in the American melting pot of Pottstown's Chicken Hill neighborhood. Moshe manages the town's recently desegregated theater. He aspires to move to a more prosperous area, but Chona won't stand for it because of her love for the store's regulars. When a local deaf Black orphan named Dodo, whom Chona helps protect, is institutionalized by the state, the community is galvanized to rescue him, and the mystery of the skeleton is revealed. McBride fleshes out the nuances of community life with characters richly portrayed by narrator Dominic Hoffman, who competently recreates the various dialects of the town and individualizes each person in this character-driven novel. VERDICT McBride has an uncanny ability to let the good in people shine through his writing; this latest book is no exception. Listeners familiar with Hoffman's narration of McBride's previous novels will be satisfied.--Kym Goering

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.