Casual Reader's Book Club: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

Join us for casual discussions, friends & fun! We are a member driven group that encourage our readers to choose the material we read and discuss. We are not hardcore bibliophiles as many times we end the night chatting and catching up with what is happening in our lives. You must have working audio and video on to attend this event. (Event also posted on "National" MtUp - please only RSVP on 1 site.)

**Book Description: "** The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Best Historical Fiction (2023)
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 neighborhood's quirky collection of blacks and European immigrants, helped by her husband, Moshe, a Romanian-born theater 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 kindess 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.