Desert Ridgers Book Club

Thanks to everyone who made it out to our inaugural book club meeting! It was incredible connecting with you all, and I absolutely loved hearing everyone's thoughts and ratings during our roundtable discussion. We’ve got a fantastic foundation of readers here, and I'm so excited for where we're taking this group.

The book for our second meeting is The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride. This is an incredible, intricate piece of historical fiction, but it has a lot more structural depth and character complexity than our first read. Because a book of this caliber deserves a real, deep-dive discussion and shouldn't be rushed, we are going to take a five-week window for it. Our second meeting will be 6:30 pm Wednesday, July 1st at The Grove Artisan Cafe on High Street.

Synopsis:
The story opens in 1972 with the discovery of a skeleton at the bottom of a well in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. To understand how it got there, the narrative pulls us back to the 1920s and 30s in Chicken Hill—a fierce, marginalized neighborhood where immigrant Jewish and African American communities live side by side.

At the center of the community are Chona, who runs the neighborhood Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, and Nate Timblin, the unofficial leader of the Black community. When the state establishment threatens a vulnerable deaf boy in the neighborhood, these characters are forced to web their lives and secrets together to protect him.

Part mystery and part intricate character study, McBride builds a sprawling, structurally complex story about what happens when the margins of society collide with the town's white establishment—proving that the truth is rarely neat, and survival requires a very specific kind of community grit.

Can't wait to dive into this one with you all!