Review: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride (audio)
where heaven and earth can come together to save a life
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride, narrated by Dominic Hoffman, is set in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, when a development crew uncovers a skeleton in a well. This long covered secret of Chicken Hill from pre-WWII where where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side during a time when Jews and African Americans were discriminated against in many and different ways.
Moshe and Chona Ludlow, the Jews who own the Heaven and Earth Grocery Store on Chicken Hill, make little money from the store, but his integrated theater brings life to the residents and money to his family with the help of Nate Timblin. Chona is a crippled young woman with a large heart filled with generosity and understanding for everyone. When these lives intertwine to keep a deaf Black boy safe from state institutionalization, the cracks in the community open the floodgates of compassion and hatred. You can’t have one without the other. The result is devastating and bittersweet.
Hoffman is an excellent narrator for all of the characters, and I enjoyed the nuance he brought to each community and character. McBride provides a richness that places you in the community and its struggles. You fall into Pottstown like quicksand, and before you are aware of it, you are attached to each character and deeply involved in each outcome - except maybe for Doc Roberts who I wanted to throttle on many occasions.
One of the biggest drawbacks is the meandering storyline and the side plots that are sometimes unresolved or have little to do with the skeleton found in the well. In many ways, I find that the use of the skeleton at the beginning was just a hook to get us reading, but the heart of this novel is Chona and the residents who seek to protect a deaf Black boy from the state and Doc Roberts’ bigoted ideas.
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride is where humanity, empathy, and care are in abundance and capitalism and hatred are ostracized and set aside. It’s a place where humanity is valued above all else. There are no race lines and fear separating the Ludlow’s from the Chicken Hill community, even if they express caution because of outside forces that threaten their way of life and ability to be human above everything.
Rating: Quatrain
About the Author:
James McBride is a native New Yorker and a graduate of New York City public schools. He studied composition at The Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio and received his Masters in Journalism from Columbia University in New York at age 22. He holds several honorary doctorates and is currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. He is married with three children. He lives in Pennsylvania and New York.
James McBride is a former staff writer for The Washington Post, People Magazine, and The Boston Globe. His work has also appeared in Essence, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times. His April, 2007 National Geographic story entitled “Hip Hop Planet” is considered a respected treatise on African American music and culture.
As a musician, he has written songs (music and lyrics) for Anita Baker, Grover Washington Jr., and Gary Burton, among others. He served as a tenor saxophone sideman for jazz legend Little Jimmy Scott. He is the recipient of several awards for his work as a composer in musical theater including the Stephen Sondheim Award and the Richard Rodgers Foundation Horizon Award. His “Riffin’ and Pontificatin’ ” Tour, a nationwide tour of high schools and colleges promoting reading through jazz, was captured in a 2003 Comcast documentary. He has been featured on national radio and television programs in America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.