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A review by sharkybookshelf
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
3.0
1930s Pottstown, Pennsylvania, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, run by Chona, sits at the heart of Chicken Hill, the run-down neighbourhood populated by the town’s immigrant Jews and African Americans…
This one left me a bit cold. It was fine, but I never felt invested in any of the characters - obviously I wanted things to work out for them because I’m not a total dick, but wasn’t desperate to find out if they would. Equally, I wasn’t particularly invested in the overall story or even who the skeleton was (the revelation felt rather anticlimactic actually).
There were just a few too many offshoots to the story - in fact, it started off as a story about Moshe and Chona and their theatre and grocery store, but then morphed into a completely different story. Instead of painting a rich, complex portrait of Chicken Hill’s dual community composed of two groups each marginalised in their own ways, the story felt disjointed, as if even the book itself wasn’t quite sure what it was supposed to be about. I also expected Malachi the Dancer to play a greater part in the story - with so much emphasis on how magical his dancing was, I really thought something would come of it.
The writing itself was good and it was easy to keep turning the pages once I was reading. But I never found myself itching to pick the book up.
An easy-to-read but ultimately disjointed and flat story of a marginalised community surviving in the US of the 1930s, resilient and resourceful in the face of racism, xenophobia and antisemitism.