AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR/FRESH AIR, WASHINGTON POST, THE NEW YORKER, AND TIME MAGAZINE ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2023 “A murder mystery locked inside a ...

It's rare that we at NUBClub find a book we think desperately needed editing, but Heaven & Earth Grocery Story has proven that they exist. McBride is trying to tell a story of a neighborhood, Chicken Hill, and how the Jewish and Black and other ethnic communities there intersected and collaborated against White oppression. That's certainly the strongest part of the novel. McBride has a very clear sense of those two communities and does a really good job both establishing characters who are strong and interesting individuals in those cultures and showing how they exist in the ecosystem of that neighborhood. There were lots of characters in the novel we enjoyed: Chona's altruism and strength, Nate's suppressed anger, Paper's gossip and manipulations, Fatty's hustles -- there were just so many people and relationships that McBride had a great handle on. In many ways, that expansiveness is exactly where the novel goes off the rails. The plotting was the issue we had the hardest time with. For half the novel, you are following the story of Chona: her marriage and store and relationships. But then Dodo is introduced as a character, and suddenly all of the characters we were following before seem secondary. The end of the story is a fusion of a water pipe caper and a hospital rescue, neither of which was established until more than halfway through the novel and which don't involve more than four of the great characters McBride has introduced. We were really confused about what the novel was about when we reach the end of only get the outcome of a single character. Why did McBride spend so much time establishing people that he was going to leave behind? The entire novel has that quality; things are introduced in chapters and explored in detail only to be dropped and never looked at again. That is coupled with some truly egregious rants from the author that can only be understood as bitter complaints -- there's literally a multi-paragraph bemoaning of cell phone use in the future that would horrify the characters of this early 20th century community. Why do we need that? What does it have to do with the story? Over and over, this happens in Heaven & Earth -- characters appear three-quarters of the way into the story, plots stop cold, and we see extra features of the world that simply dead end. It's not that McBride is a bad author -- he clearly shows real talent in his ability to imagine the interconnections of this cross-cultural community in a historical oppressive moment with both detail and power. We really just wish someone had told him to cut out the extraneous stuff and be clearer what his focus was. No one at NUBClub would recommend this book, but it's not because it's bad. On the contrary, it's because it's so obvious what the potential was that it's disappointing the ways it fell short.