Read the Rainbow Book Club
First Meeting - Monday, June 16, at 3:15 pm
Adult Book Club Discussion
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
Please join us for one of our meetings of our Adult Book Club scheduled for Tuesday, July 8, at 1:00 pm and Friday, June 11, at 1:30 pm. We will be discussing the book "The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store" by James McBride.
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 neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.
As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America 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.
Bringing his masterly storytelling skills and his deep faith in humanity to The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride has written a novel as compassionate as Deacon King Kong and as inventive as The Good Lord Bird.
Copies of the book are available for checkout at the library.
What: Adult Book Club
When/Where: Tuesday, July 8, at 1:00 p.m. - East Troy Lions Public Library
OR
When/Where: Friday, June 11, at 1:30 p.m. - East Troy Lions Public Library
East Troy Lions Public Library Adult Book Club Reading List 2025
January: The Boys by Katie Hafner
February: Breath by James Nestor
March: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
April: Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
May: James by Percival Everett
June: Bookshop of the Broken Hearted by Robert Hillman
July: Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
August: Killing the Witches by Bill O'Reilly
September: The Women by Kristin Hannah
October: Being Henry by Henry Winkler
November: Follow the River by James Alexander Thom
December: The Spy and the Traitor by Ben McIntyre