The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

This is odd. I loved this book. It’s easily one of the best I’ve read all year, one of those books you rush through everything else to get back to. But, if you asked me to describe it, to try to convince you to read it, I would have absolutely no idea where to start.

I could say it’s about how a body came to end up at the bottom of a well in a predominantly Black and Jewish neighborhood in a town in Pennsylvania in the 1930s. But it’s not a murder mystery.

I could say it’s about the divisions between Black and Jewish and White communities, in a town where the Ku Klux Klan can parade openly during the annual town celebrations. But it’s not a heavy-handed lecture.

I could say it’s about a young deaf Black boy who ends up in a ghastly hospital/asylum where the night shift is overseen by an even ghastlier monster of an attendant. But it’s not an exposé of social conditions.

Yet it is. It’s all of this. As well as a rich, lovingly detailed portrait of a community, in which equal attention is given too all the characters – good and bad – and the backgrounds they left behind to come to the neighborhood. It’s a book of stories, where you come to understand every single individual and what drives them. Where you can feel the author’s joy in the writing on every page.

And it’s funny too. As in this description of a punch that knocks out one character’s gold tooth:

I mean that white boy reached back and sent that big fist of his rambling through four or five states before it said hello to Fatty. It started in Mississippi, gone up through the Carolinas, stopped for coffee in Virginia, picked up steam coming out of Maryland… and boom! He liked to part Fatty from this world.

I just adored this book.