A review by maddijean
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

4.0

I originally gave this a 3/5 stars but after discussing with my book club I bumped it up to 4/5 because I realized how many characters I truly loved and how much the ending made up for the rest of the book for me. The first 70% of this is suppppeeerrrrr slow. The pacing of the writing is really hard to get into and I really struggled to find the motivation to read this. However, about 50% of the way in I noticed a similar cadence to Wes Anderson movies, in that, the matter of fact, info dumpy, way this was written could be seen as humorous. Once I started reading this more humorously I was able to enjoy it more, whereas the beginning felt like a chore. I also feel that the attention grabber in the beginning of finding a skeleton after the hurricane was misleading as it made my think there would be this whole mystery and secret aspect of the book and it was disappointing in the end. 
All that said, the stars of this book were really Chona, Dodo and Monkey Pants, I was pushing through to get to their storylines and especially at the end was just so invested and emotional. Even though some of the characters seem to be irrelevant to the story it all comes together at the end and you understand their connections.