Thank you Libro.fm / Recorded Books, for the ALC of The Berry Pickers in exchange for my honest review. I purchased the print book for my own collection.
Publisher: Catapult / Recorded Books
Published: October 31, 2023
Summary:
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.
My thoughts:
As soon as I started hearing about this book, I knew I had to read it. It’s a debut novel and it was both heartbreaking and completely captivating. Plus, that cover…I just love it!
This one is definitely the type of book that I know is going to stick with me for quite some time. It’s such a haunting story that just got to me. Told from two alternating perspectives, this story is about the ripple effect of loss, intergenerational trauma and the ghosts that haunt us. While there is a mystery here, that is not at the forefront of the story. We know early on who took Ruthie. The rest of the time is spent on how both families deal with the aftermath and it is this very clever plot choice that kept me glued to the story, wanting to know just where things would ultimately end up.
For a short book – it’s not even 300 pages – the author manages to pack a lot in here. Themes of loss, trauma, family, as well as race and culture are expertly woven into this story and yet despite some of these heavy themes, there is also an undercurrent of hope running through it. The characters are so vividly drawn that I felt such a strong connection to them, even the ones I didn’t necessarily like.
This will be a book I will be recommending to everyone. It’s such a stunning debut and I cannot wait to see what comes next from this talented author.
Audio thoughts:
I grabbed the audio of this one and thought the two narrators, Aaliya Warbus and Jordan Waunch, did a fantastic job bringing this story to life. Once I started listening to it, I couldn’t put it down.
