For an introduction to James McBride, try this

James McBride is the National Book Award-winning author of The Good Lord Bird and the current best-selling novel, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store.

Five-Carat Soul is a collection of seven stories, two of them long enough and complex enough to be divided into chapters. The subjects range from what sound like lightly fictionalized memoir (The Five Carat Soul Bottom Bone Band in which the narrator is a young teen) to fantasy (Mr. P & the Wind, in which the narrator is an elderly lion in a zoo).

McBride who is Black writes convincingly from the point of view of a white, Jewish toy dealer; a lion; a teen-age boy; and an unidentified observer of President Lincoln's "long, solitary walks to the War Department in the dead of night," one of two stories set during the Civil War.

I have the impression that one of McBride's interests is to dramatize history from a Black point of view. "The Good Lord Bird" tells the story of John Brown's last years and ill-fated raid on Harper's Ferry from the POV of a young Black boy who is impressed into Brown's band and plans. 

Perhaps the most powerful story in "Five-Caret Soul"—the one I found most moving—is The Christmas Dance, which hinges on an all-Black infantry division, the 92nd, fighting in Italy in WWII. The history is actual, the characters believable, the story structure fascinating. 

The stories make a neat introduction to McBride's writing.