About the Book
Title: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
Author: James McBride
Series: none
Genre: Historical Fiction
Pages: 400
Edition Read: Hardcover
Dates Read: September 4-8, 2026
Blurb: 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.
Review
I found this book at my local used bookstore. Had never heard of it or the author before but I really liked the cover. I didn’t expect this story to hit me as hard as it did. Maybe it was because I was doing Ragtime at the time and my brain was stuck in that world as well. There are quite a few similarities: following people in various communities, whether they are White, Black or Jewish, and how those communities intertwine, in both good ways and bad.
Chona is a beautiful soul. She is handicapped and always walks with a limp, but she inherites and runs the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, which becomes a central place for all the people living in Chicken Hill. She is part of the Jewish community, but is welcoming to everyone and always willing to help those in need around her. It’s what leads to the main part of the story when she helps hide Dodo, a young Black boy who a White doctor is trying to institutionalize due to his deafness. With Chona’s help, the entire neighborhood rallies around Dodo to try and help him. Which works, until it doesn’t.
To me, this book is more about the neighborhood of Chicken Hill than it was about any one character. We watch as time ticks by, as generations of people move through and out of Chicken Hill, and how it changes the neighborhood year after year. It’s a story about community and while there are horrible things happening in the world, there is still hope to find the American dream, even after years and years of struggle.
GoodReads: 5 stars
Categories: Books I've Read
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