The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters Published by Catapult on October 31, 2023
Genres: Fiction / Coming of Age, Fiction / Family Life / Siblings, Fiction / Indigenous / General
Pages: 320
Format: Audiobook
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NATIONAL BESTSELLER
2023 Barnes & Noble Discover Prize Winner
Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in FictionA four-year-old Mi’kmaq girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a mystery that will haunt the survivors, unravel a family, and remain unsolved for nearly fifty years
"A stunning debut about love, race, brutality, and the balm of forgiveness." —People, A Best New Book
July 1962. A Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family’s youngest child, vanishes. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at the edge of a berry field. Joe will remain distraught by his sister’s disappearance for years to come.
In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant, her mother frustratingly overprotective. Norma is often troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem more like memories than imagination. As she grows older, Norma slowly comes to realize there is something her parents aren’t telling her. Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she will spend decades trying to uncover this family secret.
For readers of The Vanishing Half and Woman of Light, this showstopping debut by a vibrant new voice in fiction is a riveting novel about the search for truth, the shadow of trauma, and the persistence of love across time.
"A harrowing tale of Indigenous family separation . . . [Peters] excels in writing characters for whom we can’t help rooting . . . With The Berry Pickers, Peters takes on the monumental task of giving witness to people who suffered through racist attempts of erasure like her Mi’kmaw ancestors." —The New York Times Book Review
I’ve talked about this a few times, but I accidentally discovered the Book Girls Guide late last year and decided I had to do their In Case You Missed It Backlist Challenge. I mean, what better way to get back into the bookish world than by getting a curated list of backlist for the years you missed? And for each month, I get a list of like 20 to 30 books from that year. I tend to stick to favorite genres, but I also like to try to branch out. Sometimes I choose books because I’ve heard of them, friends have reviewed them favorably, and sometimes the book/books I choose are simply based on ease of getting my eyeballs on the book. This book I had not heard of, had favorable reviews from friends with similar taste, and the wait on Libby was manageable. And I’m so glad I discovered it.
StoryGraph told me this was a good but risky match for my reading tastes. And while they weren’t wrong, they were completely wrong. This isn’t a book about trying to rescue a missing child. Yes, the child is missing; yes, they look for her, but that’s not the whole story. It’s a gentle weaving of two lives that were impacted when Ruthie disappeared. Ruthie growing up as Norma, knowing she was different but being so sheltered she didn’t know she was ‘taken’ until she was long grown and her ‘parents’ gone. She didn’t grow up knowing she was missing a family, though she had dreams of Ruthie and Joe. Meanwhile, Joe grows up with a lot of unrecognized guilt that leads him down a path that is quite self-destructive. He has a different path, and while their two very separate lives weave in a way to bring them back together, this is not a book about seeking and finding but a book about growing and finding. And I loved that.
I will say that everyone, everyone, drinks whiskey. A touch of wine, but whiskey. I don’t know what kind but everyone drinks the whiskey. The other thing that really stood out to me was that it felt too easy. The book layered in these full lives for both Ruthie/Norma and Joe over decades, and then we hit the last quarter of the book, and the truth is revealed, almost anticlimactic, and they all come together with such ease. Not that I wanted trauma per se; Joe had that covered throughout, but I felt like there would have been these big emotions. And I think they tried to be there, but then fell flat. I invested a lot into these lives and then feel like, welp hit the word count so let’s wrap this puppy up. It was a satisfying ending but that doesn’t mean I didn’t want more or that it couldn’t have delivered more. Not go take a thimble full of whiskey cuz that’s what we are doing here apparently.
About Amanda Peters
I am a woman, a daughter, a sister, an Auntie, a cat mom, a dog mom, a friend, a descendent of a revolutionary war sailor, of accused witches and Mi’kmaq ancestors. A Canadian, a traveler, a wine drinker, an admirer of stained glass, a listener of jazz and old country, a reader of books, and a teller of stories.
Associate Professor in the Department of English and Theatre at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia.
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