Reading Lately Book Club: March Pick
the NYT calls this one "heart-healing"
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After two romances in a row, it’s time to switch things up!
Our March book is The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride!
In addition to being named a best book of the year by NPR/Fresh Air, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and TIME Magazine, AND one of Barak Obama’s favorite books of 2023, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store comes highly recommended from my mom and my aunt, whose recommendations I take more seriously than anyone else’s. So I’m feeling really excited about this one. Plus I’m a huge fan of McBride’s The Color of Water, which I read in high school, and it has stayed with me all these years later.
The summary courtesy of Goodreads…
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.
As these characters' stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town's white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community-heaven and earth-that sustain us.
I hope you’ll read with us this month! Or let me know your thoughts if you’ve already read it! A reminder that Reading Lately Book Club is now on IG if you want to follow along with us.
If you want to catch up with past Reading Lately Book Club reads, you can check them all out here.
And for everything I read in February, take a look at the below post on my personal IG.
I read ‘The Good Part,’ based on your recommendation, Samantha, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Thanks so much for the tip!