The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
A Black and Jewish community in 1930s Pottstown, Pennsylvania protect a deaf Black child from the state. McBride's novel is warm, funny, generous, and quietly devastating; a portrait of solidarity between marginalized communities written with the grace of a master storyteller.
The book doesn’t earn real momentum until deep into its length, and detractors say the opening stretch “takes pages and pages and pages to go absolutely nowhere.” Many say McBride crowds in too many characters, introducing them vividly and then never returning, so the cast reads as sketches rather than people, and the whole thing “never quite coalesces into a story.” The skeleton-in-a-well mystery that opens the book gets set aside for long stretches, and some say the narration steps outside its 1930s setting to editorialize. More than one reviewer calls the finish underwhelming, describing the climax as “a dog’s breakfast of a mess.” Some push back on the sense of place too, arguing the neighborhood never gets rendered with real specificity, and admit plainly it was “hard not to fall asleep while reading this.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
