I picked up The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store (2023) by James McBride because it was on a bunch of year-end best-of lists, including Barack Obama’s favorite books. This one took a little while to get into as I figured out who all the characters were, but it was an interesting, well-written book. I can see why Obama included it on his list. This book is difficult to describe, and it’s probably best if you just read it, but I’ll do my best. The story is centered […]

Few authors are as adept at articulating characters through their relationship with a place as James McBride. His latest novel centers on a community known as Chicken Hill in Pennsylvania, the home of the titular Heaven and Earth grocery store. We are transported to various points in this community’s history, but most of the story takes place in the late 1930s. One of my biggest issues with the novel was the number of digressions – they serve a purpose! They allow us to fall deeply […]

Everyone knows that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but something I would do well to remind myself is not to get too excited and judge a book by its first few chapters. Forty or so pages into James McBride’s new novel, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, I was sure I was reading a future favorite, and possibly a real classic. Lamentably, the awe-inspiring magic of those early pages does not persist, as McBride’s ambitious scope leads to the plot losing momentum […]

James McBride’s The Good-Lord Bird is one of my favorite novels of the last decade and one I’ve recommend to countless people. So that makes the disjointed, formless Deacon King Kong all the more disappointing. A book without a strong sense of its characters, setting, or plot, this new novel meanders from one incident to another in a dissembling prose style sure to alienate the reader. The title character is an old drunk named Cuffy Lambkins, “Sportcoat” to his friends. Sportcoat is a resident of […]