Quite an intricate story but perhaps a bit muddy and a little heavy handed on "good" v "bad" guys for my taste. Your experience may vary!

McBride sets his novel in Pottstown, PA, a gritty far suburb of Philadelphia. It is the mid to late 1930’s, pre-WWII, but news is reaching the US about the rise of the Nazi party in Germany. Two groups of characters are featured: a small Jewish community and a black community, both sharing the neighborhood of “Chicken Hill,” the side of town neglected by municipal council and lacking such basic services as public water.

The central characters are Moshe Ludlow, owner of a ballroom modeled on Pottstown’s Sunnybrook ballroom, handyman Nate Timkins, who encourages his boss to book black performers as well as Jewish popular bands to increase his business, and their wives Chona and Addie. Both families get involved in trying to protect a deaf twelve-year-old orphan boy called “Dodo” from unscrupulous bureaucrats who insist on sending the boy to the notorious Pennhurst State School (the all-to-real Eastern Pennsylvania State Institution for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic).

It's a story of good versus evil and the good-hearted working poor versus the greedy, privileged class who get their comeuppance in the end.