Susie Mesure

Prejudice in Pennsylvania: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride, reviewed

Inspired by his own family history, McBride explores the problems faced by a Jewish shopkeeper and her black neighbours in the small town of Chicken Hill in the 1930s

James McBride [Getty Images]

If chicken soup is balm for the soul, then James McBride’s eighth book, set in 1930s Chicken Hill, a neighbourhood in a small town in Pennsylvania that is home to Jewish, black and other immigrant people, is its literary equivalent. There is something nourishing about The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, a warm story about the power of community in the face of prejudice that both salutes the American dream while exposing it as a sham.

Like much of McBride’s previous work, which includes four other novels, a...

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