Book Review: The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store
By James McBride
Review by Harriet

This was such a slow burn read for me, but I inhaled the last half in a day, and by the end it was firmly cemented as one of my favourite novels of 2024.

Don’t worry if the proliferation of characters and tangential backstories overwhelm at first, the strands come together with McBride’s immaculate storytelling. In fact, the real revelation is the depiction of the complicated community of Chicken Hill along the way. And this is true community: with chaos and contradictions, dubious motivations, skirmishes and secrets, sitting alongside unity and cooperation. The overt racial discrimination of 1930s Pennsylvania is confronting and horrific, and the grinding struggle for scraps of power and leverage relentless, but the furious energy of the writing and the myriad forms of resistance and defiance of the community will have you whooping and weeping. I think Maureen Corrigan’s NPR review perfectly expresses what I loved about this book when she says McBride  ‘…crowds the chaos of the world into his sentences.’.