Book Review: The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

 

Content note: This review and this book reference attempted sexual assault of an adult woman and the sexual abuse of children. 

A lot of people adored this book (and it won the US's National Book Award, so critics did too), and I definitely understand why.

It is a deeply engaged, sensitive, nuanced picture of Chicken Hill, Pottstown, Pennsylvania, a marginalised area in the US in the 1920s and 30s. It is primarily concerned with the ways in which different groups of people outside the white hegemony (primarily Black and Jewish people, but also southern European migrants and others) build their own community and their own connections. It is a story about how this patchwork community ultimately comes together to protect and save each other, with the linked focii being the liberation of a child in danger and the avenging of an egregious crime against one of their own.

The genuine affection and curiosity that McBride, who himself has both Black and Jewish ancestry, brings to the depiction of the stories and the history that led all the key characters to be in Chicken Hill is hard not to like. Some of the key characters (especially, for me, the Jewish couple the Ludlows: Moshe the theatre owner and his wife Chona who runs the titular Heaven and Earth Grocery Store; Paper, a Black woman who is beautiful, very smart, and a hinge of all local news; and Dodo, the orphaned Deaf 12-year-old who the state is trying to capture) are vibrantly realised and easy to love. There are too many characters overall, but that's not an uncommon flaw with stories of this type; the main ones do jump up from the page though, which is the most important thing. I think Chona and Paper are the joint heroines of the book, while Dodo is the inciting / inspiring character for both the heroism and the vengefulness of others, adding layers to the story that otherwise would not be there.

That said ... this is a book that I believe would have benefited enormously from a strong edit and being about 100 pages shorter. It is often slow-moving to the point of stultification, with some background information repeated seemingly three or four times in slightly different words. I'm not convinced that it added anything to the overall plot to have so much intricate backstory for so many of the crowded cast of characters. I also thought that the two villains (Doc Roberts, whose attempted rape of the comatose Chona was truly hair-raising, and Son of Man, who's a grotesque child rapist) were not well executed - they were so garishly evil as to be one-note, and therefore unbalanced antagonists for the more developed characters: Moshe and Chona, Nate and Addie, Fatty and Paper, and the others.

If you have difficulty, or get impatient, with sprawly stories with a large cast of characters to keep track of, this book is not one I'd recommend. If, on the other hand, you don't mind the mental investment of a crowded stage, and enjoy historical fiction that takes a thoughtful and often deeply insightful stab at the complexities of American race relations, class barriers, ableism, and xenophobia in the early part of the 20th century, then have at it! 

I myself am glad I read it and think it is a good book, but I didn't absolutely love it. It's a 7/10 for me.