The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store felt like a messy, contrived ramble. There are countless characters who are given extensive backstories that all tie into the main plot somehow. Instead of giving things a realistic or fleshed out feel, it made the plot feel like a Rube Goldberg machine of confidences.

At the center of much of this plot was some sort of water conspiracy that I never really got my head around. I'm sure it all lines up somehow, but I just couldn't convince myself to get invested in wells and pipes and city water.

Perhaps the most infuriating parts of this book were the admittedly very occasional rants about modern day America. Out of nowhere in a book set in 1936, the author starts lecturing us on the evils of cell phones. In general, I think this book tries to hard to be about important things, but it's just too broad to go into meaningful depth.