CLS Book Club // “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store” by James McBride

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Charleston Library Society

CLS Book Club // “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store” by James McBride

CLS Book Club is FREE, in-person, and open to the public—and also member-researched and led through thoughtfully curated discussion. Whether you’ve finished the book, are thinking about starting it, or couldn’t make it past the halfway point, please join us.

RSVP is required via the form below so that we can plan for seating.

Please note that the authors of our selections ARE NOT in attendance.

About Book Club:

Offered a few times a year, the CLS Book Club seeks to explore a wide range of topics, authors and diversity within its book selections. Under this objective, Book Club also offers space for conversation, perspectives and discourse. For The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, the ambitious duo, Sugar Slaubaugh and Mary Gus Smith will present and explore the book’s overarching narrative, after which the floor will open for questions and discussion.

About the Book:

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.