Sunday Books & Culture

This week’s reviews include National Book Award winner James McBride’s “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store” and young adult historical fiction by Rodman Philbrick and Elizabeth Wein.

THE HEAVEN AND EARTH GROCERY STORE 

by James McBride

Published by Riverhead Books (August 8, 2023)
Hardcover $16.99
Audiobook $12.99

Reviewed by Drew Gallagher

If you read nothing else in 2024, you need to read the following passage from James McBride’s astounding The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. Please understand that I am on a word limit and sharing this passage will reduce my ability to heap praise on his novel, but when given an opportunity to share greatness, I must humbly step aside. The passage is about a Memorial Day Parade set in 1930’s Pottstown, Pennsylvania, as the town celebrated its favorite son and free beer: 

“It was a nod to history, a sentimental bid to the great John Antes, Pottstown’s greatest composer. Nobody outside Pottstown had ever heard of Antes, of course, in part because he wrote trumpet sonatas that nobody played, and in part because the John Antes Historical Society’s Cornet Marching Band, which was composed of forty-five souls—numbskulls, pig farmers, heavy smokers, bums, drunks, cheerleaders, tomboys, bored college students, and any other white American in Montgomery County who could purse their lips tight enough to blast a noise through a trumpet—sounded like a cross between a crank engine trying to start on a cold October morning and a dying African silverback gorilla howling out its last. It was all a nod to Antes, the great composer, husband, father, revolutionary, statesman, plunderer, iron maker, wife beater, cornetist, Indian grave robber, and all-around great American who served as president of Pottstown borough and as a colonel under the great George Washington himself—and still found time to write marching band sonatas for trumpet, imagine that. After the daylong party and parade celebrating his life wound its way back to the Antes House, more speeches were delivered, followed by a giant outdoor pig roast party, followed by fireworks blasted into the night, at which time everyone got drunk and forgot all about old John.”

Many have forgotten John Antes, but I won’t soon forget the magic of the above passage. (In what I can only describe as a colossal failure of my parents and my upbringing, I never knew of the great John Antes even though I was born and raised a mere 20 miles from one of the world’s greatest composers of trumpet sonatas for marching bands. Instead of trekking to the Coventry Mall, I should have been making pilgrimages to the John Antes house.)

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store begins slyly as a number of character sketches with little hint of a plot thread. In McBride’s writing, this would have certainly been enough. The combination of Jewish lives and Black lives lived atop Chicken Hill in Pottstown’s poor district are entertaining in their breadth. (Again, why was I not hiking up Chicken Hill as a child?) Then, ingeniously, as genius writers are wont to do, McBride starts to bring these character threads together, and the lives intersect in subtle and then glorious ways. Ultimately, one of the most sympathetic and innocent of characters, a Black deaf boy named Dodo, is thrust into the troubled history of Chicken Hill and more broadly into the troubled history of the United States in the 1930’s north.

At novel’s end, there is a touching deathbed scene where a character’s final words are profound in their simplicity and in the memory it stirs: “Thank you, Monkey Pants.” It could have ended no better or other way. Thank you, James McBride.

Drew Gallagher is a freelance writer residing in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He is the second-most-prolific book reviewer and first video book reviewer in the 136-year history of the Free Lance-Star Newspaper. While being the first “humorist” at FXBG Advance, he still aspires to be the second-most-prolific book reviewer in the history of FXBG Advance.

TWO NOVELS FOR MIDDLE SCHOOLERS

We Own the Sky
By Rodman Philbrick

Published by Scholastic Press (September 6, 2022)
Hardcover: $14.99
Kindle: $11.99

Stateless
By Elizabeth Wein

Published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers (March 14, 2023)
Hardcover: $15.00
Kindle: $10.99

Reviewed by Nathan Sekinger

In following the news over the last few weeks, I am reminded that flight is a combination of the mechanical and inspirational. Bolts should be tightened and tested, and there is magic in flight: the effortlessness of a bird soaring, the view of a sunset from above a cloud bank, and the distant worlds that suddenly seem much closer when flying.

This is especially true in literature, and these books for middle grade readers definitely have flight on their minds too, in all its mechanical and wondrous glory.

In We Own the Sky by Rodman Philbrick, Davy and older sister Jo have been recently orphaned after their mother dies in 1924, Maine. When Cousin Ruthie shows up to the funeral, she invites the kids to go on tour with her and her flying circus.

She wants to hire them to work there. They will travel with her; staying in small towns in New England, performing at airshows in fields with dirt tracks, and sleeping in tents in between shows. Davy and Jo are immersed in a new world of bold wing walkers, daring race car drivers, and a life of adventure and showmanship.

Cousin Ruthie is a pilot and many of the performers are immigrants, Catholics and French-Canadians, which catches the attention of the growing Ku Klux Klan movement that is spreading in the area. Soon Klan members are showing up at the air shows and trying to use the crowds to spread their message. When the performers stop the Klan’s interference, they and their airshow become a target. 

Author Rodman Philbrick has crafted dozens of successful middle grade stories, and this historical adventure novel leaves Davy and Jo with a new family to fight for in a world that can be cruel but also absolutely thrilling.

Moving forward a few years in time to 1937 is the young adult novel Stateless by Elizabeth Wein. This historical fiction novel opens in Europe on the cusp of war. As a final attempt at peacemaking among European countries, a group of young fliers will compete in the “Olympics of the Air.”

This symbol of peace is the brainchild of the wealthy Lady Frith. One flier will represent each country. Stella North is Britain’s representative, but she is actually a Russian exile who left the country as a baby when her parents were killed. She is now stateless, with a “nansen” passport and no country of origin to return to. She meets other teen pilots, like Tony Roberts, from France and the German, Sebastian Rainer. 

The teens will fly from country to country in competitive timed flights. They are to be escorted by former WWI aces, like German pilot Major Florian Rosengart, “The Blue Topaz,” and Lady Frith. They will spend their days flying and their nights going to dinner parties with royalty.

This noble idea goes wrong from the start as accidents in the air are seen as evidence of sabotage. Could one of these teen pilots actually be a murderer? These young fliers seem doomed as ambassadors of goodwill with their countries at the brink of war.

Author Elizabeth Wein is drawn to this time period, and her incredible novels are rooted in extensive research even as they soar into the imaginary.

Nathan Sekinger is a middle school librarian who is always ready to share a new story with his students.

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