Happy new year! Welcome back, friends. I hope everyone has had a strong start to 2024 so far. I’ve been much less busy than normal this month, and I am loving it. I decided to dream bigger with my Goodreads reading challenge this year since I far surpassed my challenge (24 books) last year. So, this year I am aiming to read 36 books. That’s less than I read (40) last year, but I’m trying to be realistic. And my first book towards this goal was for this month’s post. So, today I’m reviewing James McBride’s latest novel, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. And to accompany this month’s review, I made a Seventh Heaven cocktail.
Seventh Heaven Recipe
2oz Gin
0.75oz Maraschino Liqueur
0.75oz Grapefruit Juice
0.5oz Egg Whites*
1 sprig Mint
*This is an optional ingredient.
In a cocktail shaker with ice, add all liquid ingredients except egg whites and shake. Separate the mixed liquid from the ice and add egg whites. Shake again without ice. Then pour into a coupe glass, garnish, and enjoy!
I didn’t mind this drink. It wasn’t my favourite, but I thought it was OK. Tom, however, loved it! This month’s special ingredient is egg whites. I picked this partially because of the story taking place on Chicken Hill, but more so for the importance of the egg delivery near the end of the novel. I think it worked well. Obviously, the egg whites don’t affect the taste of the drink overly they just add some frothiness. I liked the addition of a little froth, and again I think the drink was pretty good. And honestly I’m just not a huge fan of grapefruit juice, but if you like grapefruit more than me I think you’d really like this cocktail!
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store Synopsis
(from book cover)
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new housing development, the last thing they expected to uncover was a human skeleton. Who the skeleton was and how it got buried there were just two of the long-held secrets that had been kept for decades by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side, sharing ambitions and sorrows.
Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, which served the neighbourhood’s quirky collection of blacks and European immigrants, helped by her husband, Moshe, a Romanian-born theatre owner who integrated the town’s first dance hall. When the state came looking for a deaf black child, claiming that the boy needed to be institutionalized, Chicken Hill’s residents—roused by Chona’s kindness and the courage of a local black worker named Nate Timblin—banded together to keep the boy safe.
As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear how much the people of Chicken Hill have to struggle to survive at the margins of white Christian America and how damaging bigotry, hypocrisy, and deceit can be to a community. When the truth is revealed about the skeleton, the boy, and the part the town’s establishment played in both, McBride shows that it is love and community—heaven and earth—that ultimately sustain us.
Review
“It’s impossible to describe. But it all boils down to the same thing. Love.”
Well, this one was disappointing. I know this is my own fault, but I went into this one expecting a 5-star read. And The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store was by no means bad, but it wasn’t as great as I expected. It won so many awards and was the top book on numerous ratings, so I hyped it up too much in my head. And this has been a tough one for me. I was really torn between a 3.5 and 4-star rating. And I’m aware 3.75 exists, but that also seemed wrong, so I’m just all over the place. Oh well, let’s get into it and maybe I’ll work it out on the way.
First, the writing is beautiful. The prose really carried this novel for me. It reminded me of American classics, especially Faulkner. And I love that style of classic literature. I’ve seen other people comment that The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store is the epitome of a Great American Novel, and I have to agree. This novel dives into what it means to be an American by analyzing the diverse residents of a small town. Most characters even frequently mention what America and being American means to them. And while I’m not an American, I find these types of novels fascinating.
Beyond that, the focus on community in this novel is lovely. I felt that the town itself was a character. So much so, that I think this idea of community overshadowed the plot. And again I didn’t love this, but I didn’t hate it. Having almost every chapter focus on a different resident of the community and seeing the town and other residents from all these points of view was interesting and beautiful. And developing the novel in this way made it extremely immersive. Again, the writing style and especially the way McBride describes the setting really made me think of Faulkner.
I also loved the characters in The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. Yes, there are a ton of them and it does get a bit chaotic. But I liked that. I liked how we got to learn a little backstory about each character and see the overarching themes represented differently for each person. And, as mentioned above, I loved how learning about the characters contributed to learning about their community. The insight into all these different perspectives was fantastic. But I could also see how this could be confusing or hard to keep track of for a lot of people. I didn’t find any issues with this, but I wouldn’t be surprised if people did.
But sadly, even though I loved the prose, setting, and characters I found a lot of negatives in this novel. First, it was extremely repetitive. Not only did McBride use the same metaphor for different people numerous times in maybe 30 pages, he also told the same stories again and again. Some stories almost word for word came up multiple times being told by different characters. And maybe that’s useful for some people to remember things, but I don’t need to be told the same paragraph that isn’t even that important to the story 3+ times two chapters apart. This really bothered me and is my biggest flaw with the novel, especially because every time it happened I was completely taken out of the immersive narrative.
On a similar note, I had far too many spelling and grammatical errors in my copy. I don’t know what the editors were thinking for this novel, but oh my. During one chapter, a character’s name was spelled wrong multiple times. And since it was practically the only time that character was even mentioned by name who knows what their name even is. While that was the most egregious error, there were plenty more that again took me out of the story and just irked me.
My final negatives aren’t huge issues, but there were a couple times that the narrator mentions the future world that I found to be a bit preachy. Like an entire paragraph about how cellphones are basically evil. I get it and I don’t need this shoved down my throat in a novel that has nothing to do with that. These comments just felt unnecessary to me. And finally, the ending seemed rushed. I didn’t hate the ending, but there was so much lead up for it to just go nowhere then be explained in an epilogue. And this one might be controversial but the final line was not good. I can’t tell if it was trying to be deep or what, but it made me end the story with “really?” and that felt disappointing for what I thought was a solid novel.
So overall, I am all over the place with this one. I loved the writing and the main plot, even though the plot was secondary to the characters and community (which I also loved). And I found it enlightening and interesting to learn more about different cultures. This is also another novel that I would’ve absolutely loved to have read in school and been able to do some deep dive discussions on. But it wasn’t perfect and the negatives brought me out of the story so often that my overall feeling is disappointment. Maybe 3.75 is the right choice after all. Regardless of my feelings, I recommend reading this one. The pros still outweigh the cons and the writing is poetic. And as always, I recommend giving the Seventh Heaven cocktail a try too!
My Rating:
Thanks for reading! And, if you read the book or try the cocktail let me know in a comment or on Instagram. Also, if you haven’t yet read my previous reviews, I recommend reading The Prophets, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and We Begin at the End if you liked this one!
Teghann
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