James McBride’s newest novel, “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store,” is a murder mystery wrapped up in a Great American Novel, writes Danez Smith in a review for The New York Times.

The story opens with the discovery of a skeleton in a well in Pottstown, but it is much more than a simple whodunnit. The story explores the town’s Black, Jewish, and immigrant history.

Much of the story happens in flashbacks to the 1920s and 1930s to Chicken Hill, a neighborhood in Pottstown. Smith calls it an epic tale of a community of people bonded by love and duty.

He writes that the novel is a reminder that “even in the midst of humanity’s most wicked designs, love, community and action can save us.”

Read Smith’s full review in The New York Times.

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Interview with James McBride.