Great Writer: James McBride, HE HEAVEN AND EARTH GROCERY STORE

Publish: 2023, 400 pages

Dialectic Journal/Lesson Plans: 68 pages, 20,744 words, visuals

By showcasing neighbors misunderstanding neighbors, McBride shines a light on how communities in America are at times walled apart by difference, even in intimate relationships. Through this story, he asks: How do racial and class divides manifest in how we know and see one another and in how we allow ourselves to be known and seen?
“The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” is a charming, smart, heart-blistering and heart-healing novel. Great love bursts through these pages via the friends and families that mobilize to protect Dodo, a child endangered by the structures he was born into and injured by. With this story, McBride brilliantly captures a rapidly changing country, as seen through the eyes of the recently arrived and the formerly enslaved people of Chicken Hill. He has reached back into our shared past when, by migration and violence, segregation and collision, America was still becoming America. And through this evocation, McBride offers us a thorough reminder: Against seemingly impossible odds, even in the midst of humanity’s most wicked designs, love, community and action can save us.