If you looked at my reading habits the last few weeks, you wouldn’t say I was much of a reader. I’ve been suffering from the slump of all slumps: hashtag the struggle is real! I started Amanda Peters’ debut The Berry Pickers but, sadly, it was not the book to kickstart my reading mojo.
Joe and his family, older siblings Ben, Charlie, Mae and younger sister, Ruthie, always travel from their home in Nova Scotia to Maine to pick blueberries at the Ellis farm. They are Mi’kmaw and this is their summer ritual, gathering with many other Indigenous pickers from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. It is 1962. This is the summer that Ruthie, 4, disappears.
The Berry Pickers is told from Joe’s perspective. It is years later, and he is dying. From his death bed, he recounts the summer Ruthie went missing and the guilt that has plagued him his whole life.
There is another narrator, too. Her name is Norma and she lives with her parents, a quiet father and an overbearing mother. As a young girl, she’d had bad dreams that she couldn’t understand. In one she was in a fast moving car, and she “turned to see the face of a woman who wasn’t my mother but had my mother’s face.” It won’t take much effort for readers to figure out that Norma is Ruthie. I figured it out in the first paragraph.
The Berry Pickers covers a lot of ground and some readers might not mind that too much but, for me, it was a lot of life lived in just 300 pages. That said, the inevitable reconciliation did offer some poignant moments and having recently lost a very important family member, I did find it moving. I also enjoyed the fact that the story takes place close to home.
I think this was a good book, perhaps if I had read it at a different time, I would have motored through it.
The Ludic Reader 