The Berry Pickers – Book Review

Title:- The Berry Pickers

Author:- Amanda Peters

Date published:- April 4th 2023

No. of pages:- 307 pages

Genre:- Literary

Setting:- Nova Scotia, Boston, Maine

Rating:-

Plot:- 4/5

Writing:- 4/5

Overall rating:- 4/5

A four-year-old Mi’kmaq girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a tragic mystery that haunts the survivors, unravels a community, and remains unsolved for nearly fifty years.

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.

This book has won so many awards including

–Nominee of Barnes and Nobel Book of the Year Award

–Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction

The story starts with 1962 when a Native Indian family goes to Maine where they pick berries for the living. While there, the family’s youngest daughter, Ruthie goes missing. The last person to see Ruthie was Joe and the story talks about how the family dealt with the disappearance of Ruthie. Meanwhile in a wealthy suburb of Boston, Norma who grew up in a white household wondered why she looked very different from her parents.

This story is told in Joe’s and Norma’s POV. Each character is dealing with the trauma. Joe still felt guilty and think that he was responsible for Ruthie’s disappearance and at the same time witnessed one of his brothers brutally murdered. Norma meanwhile has a strained relationship with her mother as she believed that she was responsible for giving her mother a series of headaches. The story itself was realistic and raw with feelings and emotions very well written. You can also get a glimpse of what racism was like for Native Indians back then when the police did not take Ruthie’s disappearance seriously.

I actually liked the title of the book and I thought the author’s writing was great despite the fact that the book was her debut. I enjoyed reading, learning about different Native American cultures. The story mainly deals mostly with emotions, heartbreaks, loss of infant and child. Reading Joe’s chapters were a bit cringeworthy as he gets addicted to alcohol and beats up his wife. Norma’s emotions and her dealing after learning the truth about her heritage was all to real and well written. The book mainly talks about complexities of family dynamics and I have to say, the story as a whole was well written. The first few chapters were slightly boring but then as it went on, I actually started to enjoy the book. Joe and Norma/Ruthie are characters that are so realistic and characters that you actually can relate to.

Overall, if you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend to get this book and put the book in as TBR. Worth four stars.