"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 andwhere 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 revealedabout 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."-- - (Baker & Taylor)
When a skeleton is unearthed in the small, close-knit community of Chicken Hill, Pennsylvania, in 1972, an unforgettable cast of characters—living on the margins of white, Christian America—closely guard a secret, especially when the truth is revealed about what happened and the part the town’s white establishment played in it. - (Baker & Taylor)
THE RUNAWAY NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A NEW YORK TIMES READERS PICK: 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
WINNER OF THE 2024 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PRIZE FOR AMERICAN FICTION
FROM ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE OF 2024
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR/FRESH AIR, WASHINGTON POST, THE NEW YORKER, AND TIME MAGAZINE
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2023
“A murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel . . . Charming, smart, heart-blistering, and heart-healing.” —Danez Smith, The New York Times Book Review
“We all need—we all deserve—this vibrant, love-affirming novel that bounds over any difference that claims to separate us.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post
From James McBride, author of the bestselling Oprah’s Book Club pick Deacon King Kong and the National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird, a novel about small-town secrets and the people who keep them
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. - (Penguin Putnam)
James McBride is the author of the New York Times–bestselling Oprah’s Book Club selection Deacon King Kong, the National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird, the American classic The Color of Water, the novels Song Yet Sung and Miracle at St. Anna, the story collection Five-Carat Soul, and Kill ’Em and Leave, a biography of James Brown. One of TIME Magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2024 and the recipient of a National Humanities Medal, as well as being an accomplished musician, McBride is a distinguished writer in residence at New York University. - (Penguin Putnam)
Nate Timblin was a man who, on paper, had very little. Like most Negroes in America, he lived in a nation with statutes and decrees that consigned him as an equal but not equal, his life bound by a set of rules and regulations in matters of equality that largely did not apply to him. He had no children, no car, no insurance policy, no bank account, no business, no set of keys to anything he owned, and no land. He was a man without a country living in a world of ghosts, for having no country meant no involvement and not caring for a thing beyond your own heart and head. The only country Nate knew or cared about, besides Addie, was the thin, deaf twelve-year-old boy who at the moment either was riding a freight train to Philadelphia or was standing ten feet from him and tossing small boulders into the Manatawny Creek. Which one was it?
“Dodo.”
It was surprise that caused him to utter the boy’s name, for he knew he might as well have been talking to himself. The boy couldn’t hear. Even so, the child was busy, sorting through stones at the riverbank, stacking large ones to make some kind of embankment along the creek’s edge, tossing smaller rocks into the water.
Nate knelt, relit the lamp, and held it high, waving it to get the deaf boy’s attention. With Dodo, everything was sight, feel, and vibration, not sound. The light cast an eerie glow on the water. Yet the boy was so involved in what he was doing that Nate had to wave the light several times.
The boy saw the lamp’s reflection in the water first, then dropped the rock he was holding, turned to the source of the light, and stood up straight, a thin arm raised in a shy hello as Nate approached.
Nate pointed at the rock formation. “What you doing, boy?”
Dodo smiled. He motioned Nate closer. He drew a wide circle with his arms, demonstrating a circle of rocks, then aped holding a cradle like he was rocking a baby.
“Say what now?”
The boy rubbed his hands together, as if creating magic or heat, then cupped his hands to his ear, as if he could hear.
“You got a hole in your head, son? Was you riding the train this morning? Was that you?” Nate gently touched one of the boy’s hands. They were freezing. He placed the lamp high, holding it so that his lips could be seen. The boy had not been born deaf. An accident killed his hearing. A stove blew up in his mother’s kitchen when he was nine. Killed his eyes and ears. His eyes came back. His ears did not. But he could read lips. Nate held the lamp next to his face so Dodo could see them.
“What you doing?”
The boy’s eyes danced away, then he said, “Making a garden.”
“For what?”
“To grow sunflowers.”
“CJ and them said you was on a train this morning.”
Dodo looked away. It was his way of ignoring conversation.
Nate calmly reached out and slowly turned the boy’s head so that the boy faced him. “Was you on that train or not?”
Dodo nodded.
“All right then.” Nate looked about, then pointed to a dogwood tree nearby. “Tear me off a branch from that tree yonder and make a switch. Then come on in the house. Your auntie’ll even you out.”
He reached for the boy’s hand, but instead of reaching out, the boy drew from his pocket a folded and wrinkled white piece of paper.
Nate gently removed it from the boy’s hand and, unfolding it, held it up to the lantern. He read the words slowly, running his eyes across the paper. When he was done, his gaze settled on the boy. “I can’t read fancy words, Dodo. But Reverend Spriggs inside reads good. We’ll ask him to figure them out.”
Dodo spoke. “I know what it says,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“My ma’s dead.”
Nate was silent a moment. He peered up toward the shed and the house, thinking to himself of all that was wrong in the world.
“You don’t need no paper to tell you your ma’s got wings, son.”
“Then why I got to leave?”
“Who says you leaving?”
“This paper says it.”
Nate gently took the paper from the boy, crumpled it, and tossed it in the creek. The tall man leaned down and tapped the boy’s chest gently. “God opened up your heart when He closed your ears, boy. You got a whole country in there. Don’t fret about no paper. That paper don’t mean nothing.”
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* McBride is the maestro of the neighborhood saga, following the Carnegie-winning, Brooklyn-set Deacon King Kong (2020) with a tale of strife and love set in Chicken Hill, a hardscrabble section of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, that is home to African Americans who fled racial violence in the Deep South and Jews who escaped the pogroms of Eastern Europe. Lovely and righteous Chona, left disabled after a bout with polio, takes over Chicken Hill's sole grocery store after the death of her rabbi father, while Moshe, her adoring, jazz-fan husband, runs a theater, becoming the first manager around to welcome both whites and Blacks. Nate, an African American, is his trusted assistant; Addie, Nate's wife, is close to Chona, and their neighbors are vibrant, complicated individuals, each improvising ways to get by, ultimately joining forces to try to keep the authorities from taking Dodo, a smart, sweet, Black, orphaned deaf boy, to the hellish state asylum. McBride incisively and prismatically evokes the timbre of Jewish and Black lives of the times, while spinning intriguing backstories and choreographing telling struggles over running water, class divides, and prejudice of all kinds. Funny, tender, knockabout, gritty, and suspenseful, McBride's microcosmic, socially critiquing, and empathic novel dynamically celebrates difference, kindness, ingenuity, and the force that compels us to move heaven and earth to help each other.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Much-awarded, Oprah-anointed, and best-selling McBride is a must-read writer for an immense audience. Copyright 2023 Booklist Reviews.
Library Journal Reviews
In this follow-up to the New York Times best-selling, Oprah's Book Club-honored Deacon King Kong, a skeleton is discovered when foundations are dug in a 1970s Black and immigrant Jewish neighborhood in Pottstown, PA. And that might have something to do with efforts by residents to protect a deaf boy from institutionalization. Prepub Alert. Copyright 2023 Library Journal
Copyright 2023 Library Journal.
Library Journal Reviews
Chicken Hill, a pre—World War II Pennsylvania community, doesn't seem like much: it's poor, with no running water and a population consisting of multiple marginalized groups—Jewish, Black, Italian—all struggling, scheming, and hoping for the best while writhing in seemingly intractable disappointment. But in this latest from McBride (Deacon King Kong), their defeats evolve into triumphs. In this complex novel, McBride takes a mash-up of plots and over a dozen main characters, each with his or her own history, and weaves them together seamlessly with humor, empathy, and a determined sense of justice. The final third of the book focuses on a conspiracy by the people of Chicken Hill to rescue one of their own, a Deaf, Black, 12-year-old orphan named Dodo, from a nightmarish state asylum like something out of Dickens. Dodo was committed to this house of horrors through the treachery of a local doctor and KKK leader, Doc Roberts. But fortune has a way of flipping things around, sometimes in the right direction, and McBride ends the novel with so much poignancy and heartfelt sympathy for his characters that readers will be hard-pressed not to be moved. VERDICT A compelling novel, compellingly written, and not to be missed.—Michael F. Russo
Copyright 2023 Library Journal.
