The Berry Pickers

by Amanda Peters

Book Overview

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
2023 Barnes & Noble Discover Prize Winner
Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

A 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

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1646221958
• ISBN13: 9781646221950
• Release Date: October 2023
• Publisher: Catapult
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.36 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.4" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Emotional Damage

Whenever I read outside my chosen genre (horror), I feel like I never know what to say because I don't feel my review or opinion is as nuanced because I lack the experience others might have over me as something like this might be their normal speed/genre. Anyway, I really enjoyed this, it was so hard being with Norma as she grew up, knowing as Norma doesn't, waiting for the penny to fully drop and for her to find out the truth. There were small, important topics in the backdrop of this story, residential schools (or maybe I'm assuming that's where the Indigenous kids went? I could be totally wrong) and lost language as a result. This book was heavy and hard, and I cried a lot at the end but I'm glad I had the chance to read this. The only thing that stopped this from being a 5 star read is I really struggled with Joe's chapters. I know I literally just said this was a hard, heavy book but Joe's chapters felt a little like tragedy pr0n. Every time I switched to Joe I was like "Oh boy, here we go, what's going to happen to this poor guy now?" I don't know that it felt heavy handed exactly, but it felt like a lot on top of the overarching story. I don't know, again, I'm outside of my depths here and I could be way off the mark but it's just how I felt. Worth the read though, 100%