Book Club - "The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store", by James McBride & "Mad Honey"

Please note April is cancelled. We will meet in May and discuss April's book and May's book.
Kelly's Home
Social time; bring an appetizers and/or beverage to share with the group
5:45 - 7:45
May "The Heaven & 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.

April "Mad Honey", by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan
Olivia McAfee knows what it feels like to start over. Her picture-perfect life—living in Boston, married to a brilliant cardiothoracic surgeon, raising their beautiful son, Asher—was upended when her husband revealed a darker side. She never imagined that she would end up back in her sleepy New Hampshire hometown, living in the house she grew up in and taking over her father’s beekeeping business.

May "The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store", by James McBride
June "The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom , Elizabeth Sherrill , et al.
September "Our Missing Hearts", by Celeste Ng
October "Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine", by Gail Honeyman
November "Lessons in Chemistry" by Bonnie Garmus