Someone once noted that although the U.S. has a Poet Laureate (Ada Limón), there is no Storyteller Laureate, and he nominated James McBride. I totally agree.
This has been a banner year for fiction, with about five more stunners coming this fall. (One of the many perks of being a bookseller is getting to read books before their pub date.) James McBride's The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is one of the year's very best. Set mostly in the 1930s on Chicken Hill, an immigrant-filled neighborhood in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, it starts ostensibly as a mystery: A body is found in a well. How did it get there? But from there McBride, who can weave an imaginative story better than Athena, creates a world full of fascinating and flawed characters, with complicated backstories, who pull together to protect a deaf black child.
I can't possibly do justice to the literary machinations McBride is so good at, braiding the history of different kinds of immigrants in this neighborhood within the intricate plot. What I can say, after having this book swim around in my head since I read it, is that it may be a historical (not to mention funny) saga, but it is ultimately about myriad kinds of love: the desperate love of a spouse for his ill partner, the fierce love a childless woman feels for a boy who so needs a mother, the casual love of friends who periodically find in each other shelter from the storm, the necessary love between two inmates locked in an accursed institution. This is just one of my takeaways from this wonderful book, which will stick with you. One patron I know has already read the book several times.
Carin Pratt is one of the remarkably knowledgeable crew at the Norwich Bookstore—and an ardent recommender of books. Before she landed in these parts, she spent 27 years at CBS News, including two decades as the executive producer of Face the Nation.