From religion to music, the number 12 has important significance, a fact James McBride (Deacon King Kong; Five-Carat Soul) explores in his exuberant The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. It begins in 1972, when construction workers in Pottstown, Pa., find a skeleton at the bottom of a well. McBride then shifts to 1925, when Jewish and Black communities coexist uneasily in Pottstown. At the heart of this novel is Chona Ludlow, a polio-stricken woman who runs the grocery, and her husband, Moshe, whose integrated dance hall hosts real-life jazz figures of that era. Moshe is also plagued by dreams of Moses that come in 12s, dreams that assume added resonance when a visiting Hasid makes a dire prediction.
Then Dodo, a "thin, deaf twelve-year-old boy," suffers the death of his mother. Nate, the Black janitor at Moshe's club and the boy's uncle, asks Chona to hide Dodo from a visiting official who wants to put the boy in a "special school." Add to the mix the town physician, who leads Ku Klux Klan parades and hates that Pottstown is becoming "a town of immigrants," plus a "walking devil" known as Son of Man, and the result is a mesmerizing work. Even minor characters are richly imagined, and McBride's descriptions are marvels of concision, as when he calls one character "a thick, barrel-chested man of dangerous silences." McBride has found the perfect vehicle for dramatizing conflicts among Jewish, Black, and white Christian communities in this lively novel. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer