91 books like The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

This best-selling book tells an important story about Black women's struggles for freedom and autonomy at the founding of the American nation. And tells it so well! One of my favorite things about this book is that the title is a bit misleading: this is not actually (another) book about the Washingtons.The book centers on Ona Judge, a woman who freed herself after the Revolution and forged a new life in the tumultuous world of the newly independent United States. Dramatic and suspenseful as her personal story is, this book also tells a bigger story about how it was enslaved people themselves who made the North free. Heartbreaking, heroic, dramatic, suspenseful, inspiring.

Laurie Halse Anderson masterfully helps us see the dilemmas of those who endured the Revolutionary years, from a young runaway slave to soldiers at General Washington’s winter camp at Valley Forge. For younger readers, Forge gives the experience of surviving the bitter cold and hunger of the winter camp for both the fearful runaway slave, Curzon, posing as a freedman and soldier in Washington’s army, and his friend Isabel. You can feel the cold seeping into your rag-bound feet and taste the sand in your rock-baked flatbread, hunger pangs tormenting you as you read.

This book takes the idea of “badass” to another level of meaning and measure.

Here, Hattie is a mother of twelve children of various stories and in some ways, a stand-in for all mothers who made the migration north from the deep south of the United States. She’s tough but loving and endures the kind of struggles that would knock many people down.

It’s a book that keeps you turning the pages. 

This book couldn’t be set anywhere else. In 1985, a stand-off between city authorities and members of the MOVE organization ended when a state police helicopter dropped two bombs on MOVE’s West Philadelphia headquarters. Eleven people died, including five children, and more than 60 homes were destroyed. Two residents of the house – a 13-year-old boy and an adult woman – survived the conflagration. 

MOVE members believed in racial justice, animal rights, and a back-to-nature lifestyle. The group frequently clashed with neighbors and city leaders. On the day of the bombing, police had gone to the MOVE home to evict those living there. 

As a newspaper reporter, I twice interviewed two police officers on the scene who helped young Birdie Africa as he fled the burning home. The first words Birdie said to the officers were, “Don’t shoot me.” Two decades after the bombing, the police officers were still haunted… show more.

The little-known story of promoter Eddie Gottlieb’s South Philadelphia Hebrew Association team begins in the 1920s when professional basketball in this country was often played in a cage-encircled court to protect the athletes from the rabid fans in Philly and other cities in the hard-scrabble Eastern League. The unathletic Gottlieb kept the SPHAs at the top of the pack, along with Harlem’s all-Black Renaissance team. The story ends in the 1940s when helped organize the whites-only Basketball Association of American, the forerunner to the NBA. Gottlieb, who coached the original Philadelphia Warriors, spent the last 30 years of his life preparing each NBA season’s schedule by hand with a pencil and a legal pad.

We think of the American victories at Saratoga in 1777 and Yorktown in 1781 as the decisive battles of the war (and so, in a sense, they were). But in this Pulitzer Prize winner, Fischer makes a strong case that George Washington’s surprising victories at Trenton and Princeton were just as momentous, keeping “the Cause” alive at a moment when the Continental Army was on the verge of dissolution. Fischer provides a vivid account of the flow of battle and the key decisions that gave the Americans their advantage.

While this is not a comprehensive history of the TMI accident and its aftermath—none exists––you can happily read this book and understand the seriousness of what happened. It is not encumbered with anti-nuclear ideology, like some of the books written immediately after the accident were. It has many photos, a glossary of nuclear terms, and an index. 

I liked this book so much, I read it twice. What made it so good? O’Dell’s mastery of creating “real” people. I cared about them. I wanted to be in the story with them such was the power of her writing—a captivating story with an unusual set of characters, their lives intersecting in unexpected ways. Spain, the US, bulls and bullfighters, an old lady, a couple of teen brothers, a dysfunctional family, love and hate, baseball…

This superb book provides deep insights into the relationship between Indigenous peoples and encroaching European settlers and convincingly emphasizes that the striving of land developers, such as George Washington, Ben Franklin, and Patrick Henry, was a major cause of the American rebellion. He describes in detail the Native societies, their customs, interactions, and political alliances. The early chapters provide accounts of settlers of both sexes who were captured, adopted, nurtured, and trained by the Natives. In the case of the Girty brothers, their seizures led to their wartime careers as accomplished, multi-lingual interpreters and as fighting partisans in the British Indian Department. In addition to an amazing array of Native tribes, two companies of Butler’s Rangers operated out of Detroit assisted by the Girtys. 

What an exciting tale! I've done lots of research about life on the American frontier during the Revolutionary War, but Gary Paulsen provided information that was new to me about British attacks on small frontier villages and prison ships anchored in New York Harbor. I couldn't stop reading. The author alternated the fiction story with nonfiction segments providing further explanation. Rather than interrupt the reading, they enhanced it, elevating the excitement I felt as Samuel searched for his missing parents.