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 Great American Novel . . . Charming, smart, heart-blistering, and heart-healing.” —Danez Smith, The New York Times Book Review “We all need—we all deserve—this vibrant, love-affirming novel that bounds over any difference that claims to separate us.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post 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.

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.