The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride is a lovely book set in Pennsylvania, jumping between the late 1920s and the early 1970s. The book depicts a neighborhood made up of two distinct communities, Jewish and Black, showing how their lives intersected and how the area grew and changed over the course of 50 years. Throw in a decades-old mystery and the gathering together of disparate communities to shelter a young neighbor and find a sweet, funny and sometimes fraught, very poignant story.
You’ll enjoy the way the mystery and the characters’ lives unfold, though be prepared for some unexpected hops between the timelines. McBride will, as always, draw you deeply into the story.
Gabrielle Clark is a librarian at Hennepin County Library–Maple Grove. Read more at hclib.org.
