The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store By James McBride

 

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

By James McBride

4 stars.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton

Image
  The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton One of my favorite book tropes is the adolescent or pre-adolescent boy with psychological or social trauma and self-discovery. Some of my favorite books involve this theme: Catcher in the Rye , I Know This Much is True , and The Perks of Being a Wallflower , to name a few. The Outsiders is another book that carries this theme, following Ponyboy Curtis and a gang of greasers in the mid-20th century. Ponyboy and his two brothers navigate a world of delinquency and violence, though the three of them are smart and savvy in there own ways. The greasers and the socs have turf wars and throughout the story Ponyboy discovers that even though the two groups are very different, they are both beset by there own problems, both societal and psychological, and that they can be taken down by the prejudices of their respective social groups. After a tragic incident involving Ponyboy, his friend Johnny, and two socs, Ponyboy and Johnny go on the run to escape a murde...
Read more

Beneath the Scarlet Sky By Mark Sullivan

Image
  Beneath the Scarlet Sky By Mark Sullivan This story follows Pino Lella, an Italian teenager, who becomes enmeshed in World War II when he is enlisted as the driver for a high ranking German official. Pino is sent to a mountain getaway/school by his parents in order to keep him safe when the bombing reaches his Italian city. There, he helps to get Jews across the border to Switzerland to escape the Nazis. Afterward, when he returns home and is at the age of enlistment to be drafted into the war effort, he is noticed by General Leyers, who asks for Pino to become his driver, taking him around Italy to various appointments and battle positions. Pino saves Leyers's life a couple times, even though Pino himself is against the Nazis and is working undercover as a spy, relaying information to his uncle who is part of the resistance movement. Throughout the story Pino is forming a romantic relationship with Anna, who is the maid to Leyers's mistress, and a woman he asked out on a dat...
Read more

In the Woods by Tana French

Image
 In the Woods by Tana French In the Woods is a solid crime procedural novel about a Detective on the murder squad investigating a case of a murdered little girl and the personal stake he has in solving the crime. The characters are incredibly well fleshed out, with likeable personalities, even when they are being awful to one another. I was totally invested in the main mystery and liked how the investigation unfolded. I have to say, I knew who the killer was the second they hit the page, but I didn't know why they had done it. It was satisfying to learn the answers; the underhanded and manipulating psychopath involved was a delicious addition and really pushed the characters to their limits, which I liked. One thing I have to knock points off for for In the Woods is that the Detective Ryan past plot line wasn't resolved in a satisfying way for me. I would like to have seen some real answers to that case of his two missing friends. I was invested in his backstory and was disap...
Read more