The New York Times called this a murder mystery wrapped in a Great American Novel, and I think that’s about right.
This book is one of those that starts at the end, then backs up a few decades before working it’s way back to the setup of the scene described in the prologue.
Normally when an author does that it’s to make you wonder what happened to get the character(s) to that point. Of course, that intention is at play here, but what makes it stand out is the fact that the opening scene is set up to make it seem like one thing happened to get us there, but in truth it was something else entirely that got the characters to that point.
I can’t say more without major spoilers, and I definitely don’t want to spoil the ending of this book by James McBride, so let’s just talk about the broad strokes.
The action takes place in the 19020s and ’30s in Chicken Hill, which is a neighborhood of Pottstown, Pennsylvania. Chicken Hill is where the Blacks and the Jews live, and the action focuses on a few of the residents of Chicken Hill and what happens to them in that time period.
I would say the main character is probably Moshe Ludlow because I think the book spends the most time with him, starting with when he meets his wife, Chona, who had polio as a child and has had a limp ever since. She also has epilepsy, but she doesn’t let either of those things hold her back from doing what she loves.
The eponymous Heaven & Earth grocery story was Chona’s father’s store. It’s where she and Moshe met, and it becomes her store after her father dies.
Moshe ends up owning and running a theater and dance hall in Chicken Hill, which is so successful that Chona doesn’t have to work at the grocery store anymore. And they no longer have to live in the apartment above the grocery store. They can afford to move into a nice house in a nicer neighborhood.
But Chona doesn’t want to move, and she doesn’t want to give up her grocery store. It’s the only place where the local residents can get kosher food. It’s her connection to her father and her childhood, but it’s more than just nostalgic for her because it’s also her connection to the community.
Chona takes her religion and its orders to help her neighbors when she can very seriously, so when people can’t afford to pay, she lets them take what they need anyway and adds the cost to their tab. The problem is no one (including Chona) keeps track of their tab. And when children want candy and don’t have money to pay for it, she lets them pay in marbles, then later finds a way to give them their marbles back.
So it’s no wonder that the grocery store is losing money. But Moshe loves her too much to make her give it up, so he just supports them and the grocery store through his successful theater and dance hall money.
The action really gets going when one of Moshe’s Black employees, Nate, comes to him with a problem. His wife’s sister died a while back, leaving her son as good as orphaned since he never knew his father. Nate and his wife have taken in the kid, who’s deaf due to an accident involving an exploding stove when he was young.
Because of his deafness, the authorities want to put him in a “special school,” but this is the 1920s we’re talking about, so this “school” is nothing more than an institution where children are, at best, ignored, and at worst, horribly abused.
So when the authorities come around looking for the kid, Chona offers to take him in and hide him in and around the store. When that doesn’t work, she goes to a neighbor who was friends with Chona in school until they had a falling out. The friend still agrees to take in the kid and let him hang out with her kids when the authorities come around. She has had several children by different men, so all anyone sees when they go by her house is a bunch of Black kids playing in the yard, with no indication as to which are hers and which might be the boy they’re looking for.
I was excited to read this book because it has been on so many people’s best-of lists for 2023. I liked it, but I don’t think it quite lived up to the hype for me. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but this book starts off slow, so it took me a while to get into it. And there are so many characters that it takes a while to get them all straight.
I think this would definitely benefit from a reread, and it’s good enough that I would absolutely be willing to reread it.