This book was given to me as a CBR Book Exchange Gift last year (thanks, friend!) and had a lot of buzz about it last year; I finally got around to reading it this year, nudged by the fact that it was the November book club selection of my library book club. It was great for book club, in that overall reception to this novel was very divisive, which made for great discussion.
This novel is about 1960s Americana, focused on the lives of Jewish immigrants and African Americans in rural Pennsylvania who at times reluctantantly support each other as they work to survive and even thrive, in a neighborhood of white people that generally don’t wish to see them succeed. It’s literary fiction, historical fiction, and a mystery all wrapped up and bursting with a ton of characters, and even a time jump.
At the start of the book, we are in the present and a body is discovered at the base of a well, clutching a mezuzah. Local police poke around trying to discover who the victim could be, and how they got there, but the current residents of Chicken Hill can’t or won’t say much about it. After that opener, we are sent back to 1960 as friendships, secrets, and prejudices are all whipped together into a complex novel, so much so it’s hard for me to summarize. The main characters are Moshe and Chona Ludlow who own a local theater company, and the titular grocery store. When Moshe is asked by his employee and African American resident Nate to hide Dodo, a young black boy who is deaf from authorities who want him institutioinalized, a chain of events is set into action that will ripple throughout the community.
The story was made richer for me when we we were told by our librarian facilitator that McBride based the character of Chona on his own grandmother; however he used the novel as an opportunity to give her a much happier life, where she was cherished by her husband and seen as a vibrant and necessary member of the local community, a protector of all, from behind the corner of her local grocery store.
The writing in this novel is lyrical and beautiful but it’s a difficult novel to follow with so many different characters and disparate plot lines, though they do come together in the end. Some people in our club found the ending a little too convenenient, but I think that life is filled with funny coincidences, so I appreciate how McBride pulled it altogether in the last act.
As a bit of a content warning, the back third of this novel gets REALLY heavy and some of the subject matter was disturbing to some library patrons. I get that he was steeping the novel in historical truths regarding Pennhurst State School and Hospital, as horrible awful things happened there to residents, but it was a little more than I was expecting from a book that McBride himself framed as being humorous. I smirked a time or two, but I would put this book more in a heavy context than the hopeful note he was hoping to hit.