Book Club Chat :: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

I’m going to try something new this year: providing the highlights from my book club’s discussions in (almost) real-time. First up is our first book in our new reading year – The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.

I’ve thought about doing this for several years. To be honest, I’ve been afraid of committing to something I wasn’t sure I could keep up with. So if I’m slow to post or even miss a month, y’all give me some grace.

The goal of these posts is to provide book recommendations for other book clubs and to aid in discussions if they’ve already chosen the book we’ve reviewed. To achieve this:

Notes from our discussion will be provided in bullet points.
I may pose questions without providing answers or offer ideas without input or responses.
Notes are meant to be exemplary and not comprehensive of the discussion. We often go down rabbit holes and circle back to prior points.
Notes probably won’t be organized or presented in any particular order.

While I’ll strive to avoid spoilers, some may be included. And, I’ll provide the initial rating for the book from those who were ready to score it at the time of the discussion.

As a reminder of the books we’re reading this year, here’s our book list and schedule.

Highlights of the SOC Book Club Chat for The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

So many characters. You don’t know who to care about or who to pay attention to. But, for the characters that you end up caring about, you care a lot about them.
The many characters did provide an appropriate sense of community – it was real. And while having a real name and a nickname for some characters could be confusing, it also felt authentic.
We liked the portrayal of community and differences coming together. Appropriate and interesting given McBride’s parents – his mother was Jewish and his father was Black.
Compared this with McBride’s The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother. (Those of us who had read this one loved it.)
Along with the cast of characters, there are a lot of side plots that never seem to come to anything. It wasn’t until the incident in the store that it felt like there was a narrative to follow.
Because of this, there are things that happen you forget about (like the explosion that left Dodo deaf)
There’s social commentary dropped in abruptly with little context. It is interesting but abrupt. One description that fit was “random expository bits.”
This feels like a book that would benefit from a re-read. There are breadcrumbs that you may not pick up in the first read. (Again, stove explosion.) However, if a book requires two readings to be appreciated, is that a good thing?
So many references to religion:
– Tons of symbolism with heaven & earth – high places / low places.
– Monkey Pants as Christ figure: sacrificial, allusion to Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam
– “Son of Man” – Hebrew (OT) vs Christian (NT) connotation and how they are different
– Chona & the rest of the Jewish community