About This Book
In 1970s Pottstown, Pennsylvania, a skeleton unearthed during construction sets off a reckoning with decades of buried secrets. James McBride's novel unfolds through Chicken Hill, a struggling neighborhood where Jewish immigrants and Black Americans have built an unlikely, fragile community around a small grocery store. When the state comes for a deaf Black child, that community faces a test of loyalty, courage, and what it truly means to look out for one another. The stakes are intimate but the questions are vast — about belonging, about who gets protected and who gets sacrificed, and about the quiet, unrecorded ways ordinary people resist a hostile world.
McBride writes with the generous, unhurried confidence of a storyteller who trusts his characters completely. The novel moves between voices and timelines with the ease of oral tradition — sprawling yet controlled, funny and heartbreaking in the same breath. What sets it apart is how fully it inhabits a community rather than just a plot: the grocery store, the dance hall, the street corners and kitchens are rendered with the kind of specificity that makes a fictional world feel like memory. It rewards readers who give themselves over to its rhythm.