January Book Club Review:

The Thursday Night book club started the New year discussing James McBride’s book, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.  This book received mixed reviews during group discussion.

The book starts with the discovery of a body in a well in the contemporary town of Pottsville Pa.  (This storyline is not completed until the last few chapters of the book).

The reader is then taken back to the 1930’s where we are introduced to a multitude of characters who inhabit Chicken Hill a “suburb” of Pottstown.  Each individual has a separate story with their own issues, struggles and feelings.  Yet, each “short” story, with lots of tangents and back stories, is integrated to the main story line which is about a mixed -race community and how the people interact with each other and unite together in common purpose when it is needed.  There is no main protagonist and no central story line.  Despite race, religion and class there is a community.

McBride’s uses a blend of literary and historical fiction (Pottstown, Chicken Hill and Pennhurst Asylum are not fictional places) and humour to address black/white racism and antisemitism.  His  purpose through the book is to “humanize” the complications of discussing race in America, the task of understanding other people, and offering the suggestion that it is possible to jump over the differences that separate us.  This is a message novel – “every act of being is a chance to improve the world”.

Too many characters, too many sub plots, too slow moving or an accurate illustration of a diverse community with unique individuals who chose how to let themselves be known and seen by others in  a common cause?