The Berry Pickers

The Berry Pickers

Amanda Peters

Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

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.


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  • Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

    It’s not the destination, it’s the journey .
    - Ralph Waldo Emerson


    I could not think of a more perfect quote to describe this book. If you’re paying any attention, you already know how the story ends within the first few pages. But this book is so much more about the journey to the ending rather than the actual ending!

    This is a beautiful story from the perspectives of Joe and Norma, as they try to understand and work through the cards they’ve been dealt in the game of life. The writing perfectly captures the whirlwind emotions the two are feeling as they reminisce on their lives. It’s both heartbreaking and heartwarming at the same time. I adore this story and wish I could read it again for the first time :’)

    ALSO did anyone else pick up on the fact that the reason the POVs are Joe and Ruthie/Norma is because it is the back and forth of them sharing their stories with each other??? The prologue starts with joe being told someone (Ruthie) is there to see him and then in chapter 15 the two acknowledge that they’d like to hear each other’s stories. Such a great full circle moment.

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