Read. Write. Listen. Create.

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store starts out “in 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new housing development, the last thing they expected to uncover was a human skeleton. Who the skeleton was and how it got buried there were just two of the long-held secrets that had been kept for decades by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side, sharing ambitions and sorrows. 

Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, which served the neighborhood’s quirky collection of blacks and European immigrants, helped by her husband, Moshe, a Romanian-born theater owner who integrated the town’s first dance hall. When the state came looking for a deaf black child, claiming that the boy needed to be institutionalized, Chicken Hill’s residents—roused by Chona’s kindess and the courage of a local black worker named Nate Timblin—banded together to keep the boy safe.

As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear how much the people of Chicken Hill have to struggle to survive at the margins of white Christian America and how damaging bigotry, hypocrisy, and deceit can be to a community. When the truth is revealed about the skeleton, the boy, and the part the town’s establishment played in both, McBride shows that it is love and community—heaven and earth—that ultimately sustain us (Goodreads).”

There are a lot of characters and not all of them are part of the main story. It felt like more characters were included to make the book feel like a town full of people.

For the most part, I liked hearing about all of the different people’s backgrounds and lives. At first I didn’t really get that the story was a flashback to the 1930s and not in the 1970s. I gave the book 3.25 stars out of 5 stars.

The story felt like it changed from following Chona and Moshe to following Dodo. I thought the skeleton in the well was going to be a bigger part of the story, but it happened towards the end of the book.

This book deals with sexual assault of a minor. The only explanation I want to believe of why this devastating incident would happen in this book is that it shows how the hospitals and sanitariums that were supposed to take care of disabled or what people considered disabled people, were not fit for the residents. They didn’t take the responsibility of making sure the people were safe seriously. Those chapters were sad and hard to read, but I liked the friend that Dodo made.

The main theme was that small communities come together for one another and I thought that was a good message, but not all of the people featured in the book were part of the main story so it got confusing sometimes.

Things were included that didn’t feel necessary and left me and the rest of book club confused. At least we were confused together! Overall, I liked it. I liked the message as a whole, but found myself liking Dodo’s story more than Chona’s or anyone else’s. I’d encourage you to read it and see what you think.