McBride's The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store: Moving injustice

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride is a moving literary exploration of historical injustice, identity, community and resilience. Read my full review.

Publication: Hachette Australia, August 2023.

Genre: Historical Fiction, Literature, Drama, Mystery

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store Publisher Synopsis

The million-copy bestseller: a literary murder-mystery about communities standing together against power and oppression.

Barack Obama’s Book of the Year Pick
Book of the Year in The Guardian, New Yorker, Time Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Oprah Daily, Washington Post and many more…

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighbourhood where Jewish immigrants and African Americans lived side by side through the 1920s and ’30s.

In this novel about small-town secrets and the people who keep them, James McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community – heaven and earth – that sustain us.

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My Review

Given the seemingly unanimous praise that James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store has received, it has been on my radar since its release. Its billing as a literary murder mystery with heavy focus on the lives of minorities in the 1920s and 1930s sounded right up my alley.

Firstly, I’m of the view that mismatched expectations only harm the reading experience. So, I feel compelled to highlight that while this story has a clever murder mystery wrapper which does add a measure of suspense, the bulk of its narrative is better termed a literary historical drama. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is largely a story about what occurred in a community preceding an unexplained death, rather than its investigation.

This story’s power are its themes — identity, community and resilience — things we can all identify with to some degree. McBride explores these themes from myriad angles; interconnecting webs of community and personal identity based on place, faith, culture, and shared experiences. He does this by providing readers windows into the lives of a relatively large cast of characters from various walks of life. Many are minorities carving out a life in contexts they are rarely made to feel welcome. Experiencing the injustice through their eyes, and their resilience in the face of it, is deeply moving.

What really struck a chord with me was that shining brightest and most influential amongst them, in spite of societal expectations at the time, are the female characters. One of the standouts, Chona:

To her the world was not a china closet where you admire this and don’t touch that. Rather, she saw it as a place where every act of living was a chance for tikkun olam, to improve the world. The tiny woman with the bad foot was all soul. Big. Moshe was a foot taller, yet she was the big one.

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In fact, while not featuring magical realism, in many other respects, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store‘s matriarchal strength and immersive, at times decadent literary narrative, reminded me of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

So, I can understand why this story captured the zeitgeist on its release — McBride’s story is undeniably impactful and stirring. However this novel’s execution does have weaknesses.

Not all the narrative tangents felt as value-adding; some diminishing suspense and pacing. Also, the authorial voice intrudes a little too far on occasion. I typically enjoy an author’s transparent interjection, in a quirky manner for example. But these instances, either through an overly didactic character monologue or readers otherwise being told rather than shown things, just felt like inconsistencies.

While far from perfect, much like the world we live in… James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store deserves high praise for tackling subject matter others avoid. The deeply moving and impactful way it shines light on injustice and celebrates those whose soul and resilience make the world a better place, makes it deserving of a spot on anyone’s reading list. An excellent title to spark book club discussion also.