Book Review: James McBride’s latest novel is a tour de force celebrating community and compassion

Get Nadine White's Race Report newsletter for a fresh perspective on the week's news Get our free newsletter from The Independent's Race Correspondent Get our free newsletter from The Independent's Race Correspondent SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” by James McBride “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store,” James McBride’s tour de force of a new novel, opens in 1972, when authorities discover a human skeleton and mezuzah at the bottom of a well in the small community of Pottstown in southeast Pennsylvania. Waving off the suggestion that something is amiss because the mezuzah wasn’t attached to its customary place on the door of a Jewish home, Malachi offers up this sage observation: “Jewish life is portable.” The very next day, Hurricane Agnes barrels into the region, churning up flood waters that wipe out every trace of the potential crime, prompting this humorous aside from a chorus of elderly Black women: “White folks was jumping off their rooftops in Pottstown like they was on the Titanic.” So begins McBride’s mesmerizing, moving, almost magical tale set nearly half a century before the flood about the intertwined lives of a group of poor Black, Jewish and Italian misfits and dreamers who band together to rescue an orphaned deaf Black boy from a state institution while fending off interference from the town’s bigoted white leaders. McBride, the prize-winning author of “Deacon King Kong,” “The Good Lord Bird” and “The Color of Water” and an accomplished musician, writes sentences and paragraphs that swing like jazz melodies. “His staff looked like the United Nations, long before the word `diversity’ echoed around America,” McBride writes.