by James McBride
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Well, well, this was a quirky read. I was interested in it for a couple reasons; first of all, the good reviews, and, secondly, our son and his family live in Chester County, not far from Pottstown, PA, the setting of this story.
I had never heard of “Chicken Hill” or of any settlement of Jews, Blacks, or Eastern European immigrants in the Pottstown area. Known today as the home town of the Hill School, an elite and expensive boarding school, Pottstown, apparently, was born as an industrial town, and the immigrants were attracted by the work the factories offered. Slaves from the south came to Pottstown via the Underground Railroad and found it a good place to farm and settle. A significant number of Jewish families “immigrated from Philadelphia” to open shops and services to the existing community. This eclectic mix of residents didn’t always get along, but they leaned upon each other because they shared the commraderie of second class citizens, feeling the condescension of the WASP town founders.
As the tale begins, human remains are discovered in an old abandoned well. James McBride crafts his fiction around this mystery and eventually reveals the soul who perished, why he perished, and the responsible parties. In between the discovery of the body and the conclusion (and the in-between part is the bulk of the book) McBride introduces a multitude of variegated characters, families, and interconnections of the same. Dialogue is in the vernacular, which proves sometimes nearly inscrutible but occasionally entertaining. Moshe the well-respected and upright Jewish-Romanian theatre owner; his beloved Christian wife Chona, the grocery shop-keeper; African-American Nate who keeps his head down and stays mysteriously quiet; a talented shoemaker; a sketchy town doctor; a prophetess, and an assortment of townspeople each have a role to play in this drama! Neither people nor events are random as each is a necessary piece to the literary puzzle.
This book was a bit of a challenge for me at times. I would have benefited from a chart to keep the characters straight, and it was hard to detect progress in the plot. Halfway through I would have told you that there was no way this book was getting more than a 3 star rating. Nevertheless, the brilliant way in which the author wove this plot impressed me, and the story itself proved to be quite good. It’s a 3.5.
BubbiesBooknBlog 
Interesting. The tale of his own upbringing by his diminutive Jewish mother in The Color of Water likely gives him insight into the complexities of Jewish-Black community. Adding this to my list.
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I didn’t know anything about him. That is an interesting fact indeed!
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