Back at it again!
Our meeting in March was to discuss The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods. April was kind enough to host at her house. While I missed the meeting and the discussion, it seems a great time was had by all who joined!
We will be meeting here again in just a little over a week to discuss The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride. Hope everyone can join us for that meeting!
Book Pick for April:
The book for April will be The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
Selected by: Connie LaLumia
Book Club Meeting Date and Time: Saturday, April 27 1-3pm
Location: Connie LaLumia’s Home (1106 Horizon Trail)
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.
As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.
Bringing his masterly storytelling skills and his deep faith in humanity to The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride has written a novel as compassionate as Deacon King Kong and as inventive as The Good Lord Bird.