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MAY 2026 READING

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Heaven & Earth Grocery Store: A Novel

by James McBride

published 2023, Riverhead Books

400 pp,

ISBN 978-0593422946​​

Book Club Meeting:  

May 26, 2026, 7:00 pm 

Hosted by:   Ann Manzano

​​Snack provided by:  Donna West

​Wine provided by: Ann Manzano/Cathy Enz

Book selected by:  Sandy Hudler

Accessibility

Print​

  • Finger Lakes Library System
     

E-book​

  • NY Public Library 

  • Amazon (Kindle)

 

E-audio book​

  • Amazon (Audible)

About the Author:  James McBride

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"James McBride’s writing career began in his first year at Oberlin College in Ohio, when his spotty academic record had placed him in a course for students who were not quite ready for undergraduate work. For a writing assignment, he typed up a story about a man who goes to the bathroom, has a heart attack, and dies. 'It was a horrible story,' McBride says, laughing, and then guffawing, at the memory. But there was something to the writing.

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'You have a touch for this,' Tom Taylor, his teacher, said.

 

He went on to receive a liberal arts education and studied jazz with Wendell Logan, Oberlin’s only jazz expert in those days. 

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Today, McBride is known as the author of several distinguished books, foremost among them, The Color of Water, 'an instant classic,' in the words of a New York Times reviewer. The book is about McBride’s upbringing in a family of several African-American children born to a white, Jewish mother. It sold more than 2.5 million copies and has been translated into 16 languages.

 

McBride also wrote The Good Lord Bird, a picaresque rendering of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, as witnessed by a black man who was living incognito as a woman. It won the National Book Award for fiction in 2013.

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In 2016, McBride published Kill ’Em and Leave, a book about James Brown that took him into a fever swamp of unreliable sources and the dustup surrounding the singer’s contested financial legacy.

 

McBride’s own story has several storylines.  After attending Columbia Journalism School, he began reporting for the News Journal in Wilmington, Del., where he won an award for his writing. After a couple years, he quit the news business to explore his roots and play music in Africa.

 

Returning to the United States, he came back to journalism, before quitting again, to work as a musician full-time. He played with Little Jimmy Scott, and wrote music for Grover Washington Jr., Anita Baker, and Barney the purple dinosaur, but not, he says, the well-known 'I Love You,' song, though he wishes he had. He also began working on The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother.

 

A memoir, its chapters alternate between McBride’s memories of growing up poor in a family of 12 children in Brooklyn and Queens and an oral history he took from his mother, Ruth, whose family came to the United States in the 1920s to escape persecution in Poland.

 

As a boy, McBride was always curious about his mother’s much paler skin color, the object of many odd looks and some offensive remarks the family endured as they went about in public. Ruth put off his questions, insisting that the only things he needed to worry about were school and church.

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One day the boy asked a different question: What color is God? His mother’s answer became the title of his book"

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SOURCE

Heaven & Earth Grocery Store: A Novel

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"McBride follows up his hit novel Deacon King Kong (2020) with another boisterous hymn to community, mercy, and karmic justice.

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It's June 1972, and the Pennsylvania State Police have some questions concerning a skeleton found at the bottom of an old well in the ramshackle Chicken Hill section of Pottstown that’s been marked for redevelopment.

 

But Hurricane Agnes intervenes by washing away the skeleton and all other physical evidence of a series of extraordinary events that began more than 40 years earlier, when Jewish and African American citizens shared lives, hopes, and heartbreak in that same neighborhood.

 

At the literal and figurative heart of these events is Chona Ludlow, the forbearing, compassionate Jewish proprietor of the novel’s eponymous grocery store, whose instinctive kindness and fairness toward the Black families of Chicken Hill exceed even that of her husband, Moshe, who, with Chona’s encouragement, desegregates his theater to allow his Black neighbors to fully enjoy acts like Chick Webb’s swing orchestra.

 

Many local White Christians frown upon the easygoing relationship between Jews and Blacks, especially Doc Roberts, Pottstown’s leading physician, who marches every year in the local Ku Klux Klan parade.

 

The ties binding the Ludlows to their Black neighbors become even stronger over the years, but that bond is tested most stringently and perilously when Chona helps Nate Timblin, a taciturn Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of his community, conceal and protect a young orphan named Dodo who lost his hearing in an explosion. He isn’t at all 'feeble-minded,' but the government wants to put him in an institution promising little care and much abuse.

 

The interlocking destinies of these and other characters make for tense, absorbing drama and, at times, warm, humane comedy. McBride’s well-established skill with narrative tactics may sometimes spill toward the melodramatic here. But as in McBride’s previous works, you barely notice such relatively minor contrivances because of the depth of characterizations and the pitch-perfect dialogue of his Black and Jewish characters. It’s possible to draw a clear, straight line from McBride’s breakthrough memoir, The Color of Water (1996), to the themes of this latest work.

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If it’s possible for America to have a poet laureate, why can’t James McBride be its storyteller-in-chief?"

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SOURCE

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Additional Resources

Chicken Hill, Pottstown, Pa

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Library Bookshelves

DRYDEN BOOK CLUB

est. 2001

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