The Heaven and Earth Grocery store by James McBride

August's book was suggested by Michael and accepted in June's book club. Should be a nice book for the summer session.

Standard length - in IndyPL - the unearthing of a skeleton in a mixed black/Jewish Pennsylvania community raises a bunch of questions.

400 pages, not too long.

From Goodreads:

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new housing development, the last thing they expected to uncover was a human skeleton. Who the skeleton was and how it got buried there were just two of the long-held secrets that had been kept for decades by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side, sharing ambitions and sorrows. …

Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, which served the neighborhood's quirky collection of blacks and European immigrants, helped by her husband, Moshe, a Romanian-born theater owner who integrated the town's first dance hall. When the state came looking for a deaf black child, claiming that the boy needed to be institutionalized, Chicken Hill's residents—roused by Chona's kindess and the courage of a local black worker named Nate Timblin—banded together to keep the boy safe.

As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear how much the people of Chicken Hill have to struggle to survive at the margins of white Christian America and how damaging bigotry, hypocrisy, and deceit can be to a community. When the truth is revealed about the skeleton, the boy, and the part the town’s establishment played in both, McBride shows that it is love and community—heaven and earth—that ultimately sustain us.
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Interested in suggesting a book? Bring it up to me at a meeting (or after by Meetup messages) and we can talk about it, if it sounds like it will fit I will add it to the list to be voted on by the group. There are some genre, content and page length restrictions but we're down to give most things a shot.

I have made a Google Doc that people can view to publicize the current set of suggestions see my notes on them. I've included an introduction to make it clear what I look for, how I suggest books and how to interact with the system.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bpxyKJlZC08MduYEdX8_uOBWu_FpIqJh2NxwFsMHfIA/edit?usp=sharing