Book Blog #328: The Heavan and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

 

Title: The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

Author: James McBride

# of Pages: 389 (hardback)

Genre: Adult, Historical Fiction, Mystery

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

Synopsis: 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 neighbourhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows.

Review: This is somewhere between 2 and 3 stars. 

This book wasn't BAD per se. My problems with the writing style can be mostly chalked up to McBride making "artistic choices" that I don't enjoy. 

First, the most obvious: third person POV switching. This one is employed A LOT - every chapter. Third person story telling is already somewhat prone to some POV switching, but this one tries to cover everyone involved AND can time skip (either a bit before or a bit after the previous chapter's events). I got the classic "I wish I could hear more about the OTHER characters" feeling with some of the characters (such as Doc, Gus, etc.). 

Now, I would say that the third person POV switching did make the ending ~100 pages more gripping, and the ending is by far the best part of the book. However, this is more because the book becomes less-slice of life and more mystery, and there's actually PLOT PROGRESSION. 

Which leads me to my second major problem with this book - the author is a big rambler. There's a lot of TELLING rather than SHOWING the characters' background. McBride repeats some "important" details as if forgetting that it was already mentioned 50 billion times already. I wanted to scream "I KNOW already! Let's get a move on the rest of the story!" It wasn't even clear what this book would be about in the first 100 pages because McBride was introducing so many people - even at the end it's clear that McBride doesn't have a single protagonist for this book (is it Moshe, who is the focus at the beginning but less so by the end? Nope, likely no one person is the protagonist). 

Not having a clear protagonist DID mean that I ended up caring about a lot of characters (thus why I considered giving it 3 stars), but not everyone's story is nicely tided up in a bow by the epilogue, unfortunately. Unlike other mysteries where there ending is satisfying, this one left me feeling like there was still more story that could have been told, but McBride decided it was time to focus and end it at 389 pages.

I probably will not read another McBride book again.