Book Club

Date

April 17th, 2024

Time

5:30 pm

Location

Throwback Brewery

Our 17th meeting will be on April 17th! A week later than usual due to our popular Chocolate, Cheese, and Beer Dinner on April 10th, and a few minutes earlier, starting at 5:30pm. That’s because we have a pretty cool speaker for our Wednesday Wellness Series immediately following Book Club this time, so you might want to stick around. She might look familiar to you…you’ll have to wait and see! Anyway, we’ll be reading the The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride.

As for the past few meetings, we’ll cap attendance around ~16 in order to make for a nice discussion size. If there end up being a lot of people that want to attend, we can divide the group in two.

Here’s a bit more about the book:

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR/FRESH AIR, WASHINGTON POST, THE NEW YORKER, AND TIME MAGAZINE

ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2023

“A murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel . . . Charming, smart, heart-blistering, and heart-healing.” —Danez Smith, The New York Times Book Review

“We all need—we all deserve—this vibrant, love-affirming novel that bounds over any difference that claims to separate us.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

From James McBride, author of the bestselling Oprah’s Book Club pick Deacon King Kong and the National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird, a novel about small-town secrets and the people who keep them

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.

As always, if you want off of this book club email, please just let me know!

A few things to note, if you are interested in book club.

1- We usually cap these meetings at 16 people or so, please shoot us an email if you’d like to attend.

2- We also have a Throwback Brewery Book Club email distribution list. We email everyone on the list 2x a month – once to let everyone know what the next book and book club date is, and once again (a week before the meeting) to get a headcount of who plans on attending. If that sounds like something you are interested in, email us to add you to our distribution list!