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A review by jdscott50
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
emotional
funny
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
5.0
Bestselling author of Deacon King Kong and The Good Lord Bird returns with a new book. Author James McBride's novel, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, focuses on the small town of Pottsville, Pennsylvania. Moche and his wife Chona run a small grocery store that serves the Jewish community, immigrants, and Black residents. He also runs a local integrated theatre that brings in popular music acts. We see the ups and downs of this small community and its dark secrets. They stick together despite constant troubles.
This was an immersive, emotional, educational, and, at times, thrilling read. McBride sets up the community and its characters from Moche and Chona, Malachi, Addie, Nate, Fatty, Dodo, and more. They deal with a racist town and fiendish government agendas who kidnap Dodo since he is deaf. A heist is panned. Water must be tapped, and an accidental murder happens. This is an engaging and educational read.
Favorite Passages:
“And from there, every single bit of that who-shot-John nonsense got throwed into the Schuylkill, and from there, it flowed into the Chesapeake Bay down in Maryland, and from there, out to the Atlantic. And that’s where the bones of that rotten scoundrel whose name is not worthy to be called by my lips is floating to this day. At the bottom of the ocean, with the fish picking his bones and the devil keeping score.”
Nate Timblin was a man who, on paper, had very little. Like most Negroes in America, he lived in a nation with statutes and decrees that consigned him as an equal but not equal, his life bound by a set of rules and regulations in matters of equality that largely did not apply to him. His world, his wants, his needs were of little value to anyone but himself. He had no children, no car, no insurance policy, no bank account, no dining-room set, no jewelry, no business, no set of keys to anything he owned, and no land. He was a man without a country living in a world of ghosts, for having no country meant no involvement and not caring for a thing beyond your own heart and head, and ghosts and spirits were the only thing certain in a world where your existence was invisible. The truth was, the only country Nate knew or cared about, besides Addie, was the thin, deaf, twelve-year-old boy who at the moment was either riding a freight train to Philadelphia or was a full-blown ghost wearing a schoolboy cap, old boots, and a ragged shirt and vest standing ten feet from him tossing small boulders into the Manatawny Creek before his eyes. Which one was it?
Nate was silent a moment. He peered up the slight embankment, toward the shed and the house, thinking to himself of all that was wrong in the world. So many of God’s dangers, he thought, are not the gifts they appear to be.
These lost people spread across the American countryside, bewildered, their yeshiva education useless, their proud history ignored, as the clankety-clank of American industry churned around them, their proud past as watchmakers and tailors, scholars and historians, musicians and artists, gone, wasted. Americans cared about money. And power. And government. Jews had none of those things; their job was to tread lightly in the land of milk and honey and be thankful that they were free to walk the land without getting their duffs kicked—or worse. Life in America was hard, but it was free, and if you worked hard, you might gain some opportunity, maybe even open a shop or business of some kind.
This was an immersive, emotional, educational, and, at times, thrilling read. McBride sets up the community and its characters from Moche and Chona, Malachi, Addie, Nate, Fatty, Dodo, and more. They deal with a racist town and fiendish government agendas who kidnap Dodo since he is deaf. A heist is panned. Water must be tapped, and an accidental murder happens. This is an engaging and educational read.
Favorite Passages:
“And from there, every single bit of that who-shot-John nonsense got throwed into the Schuylkill, and from there, it flowed into the Chesapeake Bay down in Maryland, and from there, out to the Atlantic. And that’s where the bones of that rotten scoundrel whose name is not worthy to be called by my lips is floating to this day. At the bottom of the ocean, with the fish picking his bones and the devil keeping score.”
Nate Timblin was a man who, on paper, had very little. Like most Negroes in America, he lived in a nation with statutes and decrees that consigned him as an equal but not equal, his life bound by a set of rules and regulations in matters of equality that largely did not apply to him. His world, his wants, his needs were of little value to anyone but himself. He had no children, no car, no insurance policy, no bank account, no dining-room set, no jewelry, no business, no set of keys to anything he owned, and no land. He was a man without a country living in a world of ghosts, for having no country meant no involvement and not caring for a thing beyond your own heart and head, and ghosts and spirits were the only thing certain in a world where your existence was invisible. The truth was, the only country Nate knew or cared about, besides Addie, was the thin, deaf, twelve-year-old boy who at the moment was either riding a freight train to Philadelphia or was a full-blown ghost wearing a schoolboy cap, old boots, and a ragged shirt and vest standing ten feet from him tossing small boulders into the Manatawny Creek before his eyes. Which one was it?
Nate was silent a moment. He peered up the slight embankment, toward the shed and the house, thinking to himself of all that was wrong in the world. So many of God’s dangers, he thought, are not the gifts they appear to be.
These lost people spread across the American countryside, bewildered, their yeshiva education useless, their proud history ignored, as the clankety-clank of American industry churned around them, their proud past as watchmakers and tailors, scholars and historians, musicians and artists, gone, wasted. Americans cared about money. And power. And government. Jews had none of those things; their job was to tread lightly in the land of milk and honey and be thankful that they were free to walk the land without getting their duffs kicked—or worse. Life in America was hard, but it was free, and if you worked hard, you might gain some opportunity, maybe even open a shop or business of some kind.