The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

McBride builds his mystery, a skeleton found at the bottom of a well in 1972 Pottstown, Pennsylvania, outward from a Jewish immigrant grocer and her Black and immigrant neighbors in the 1930s, and reviewers have consistently singled out how deftly he handles a large ensemble without letting any one character become a mouthpiece. What critics keep returning to is the tonal balance: real menace (eugenics-era medical abuse, a doomed institution for disabled children) sits next to McBride's characteristic comic warmth and communal texture. It's not treated as a tidy history lesson; several notices flag that the plotting sprawls and takes its time cohering.