Leaves & Literacy Book Club (July 2026)

Leaf & Petal has our very own book club! Headed up by Maeve and Georgia (usually), Leaves & Literacy is a chance to discover and discuss new books, drink delicious tea, and get an exclusive handmade item! In person spots for this book club are currently limited to a small amount, due to space, but we do hope to expand in the future!

How it works: 

1. Purchase your book club box at the beginning of the month to pick up in store or have shipped to you. (Available for order/pickup/shipping, July 16th)
2. Receive your book club box. Drink your tea and read your book. 
3. Come to the book club meeting at Leaf & Petal the first or second Tuesday of each month (this meeting will be August 11th) where you will discuss the book, enjoy tea and refreshments (provided free of charge), get a 20% discount to shop, and get FIRST chance at signing up for the next month's book club. 

What your package includes:

• The book of the month: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
• Two small bags of loose leaf tea: Golden Milk and Hazey Peach
• A handcrafted crocheted bookmark by Maeve Randall
• Disposable tea bags and two surprise themed stickers!

About The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store: 

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.

As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.

Bringing his masterly storytelling skills and his deep faith in humanity to The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride has written a novel as compassionate as Deacon King Kong and as inventive as The Good Lord Bird.