The Berry Pickers
by Amanda Berry
Award: Carnegie Winner 2024
Date Read: May 12, 2024
From Kirkus Reviews:
“An Indigenous family is forever changed after one of their own goes missing.
Peters’ debut novel explores the lives of a Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia as they grapple with their decades-old trauma. In 1962, Ruthie, the family’s youngest daughter, goes missing from the berry farm in Maine where they work every summer. Told from alternating perspectives, the novel follows Joe, Ruthie’s older brother and the last person to see her before she went missing, and Norma, a young girl living in Maine with an aloof father and overbearing mother. Lying on his deathbed, Joe thinks back on his life, which has been filled with grief, rage, and all-consuming guilt: “People have given me their time, their love, their bodies, their secrets. And I’ve given so little.” After a brutal act of violence, Joe spent the next few decades running from himself and his sins, so as not to inflict more harm onto the ones he loves the most. Meanwhile, Norma recounts her life, which was plagued by a different kind of guilt, one that caused her to always be the dutiful daughter—the daughter who didn’t ask too many questions, ignored the lack of baby pictures, and chose to forget the vivid and painful dreams that plagued her childhood (“Each time I woke, I grieved for the woman cloaked in darkness and I tried to call out to her”). Eventually, Norma goes to college, becomes a teacher, and falls in love—and she spends the next few decades finding a way to live with the unsettling feeling that something isn’t quite right with her life. As Norma’s true identity is barely concealed, the novel is less concerned with maintaining a mystery than with exploring how brutality ripples out, touching everything and everyone in its wake. Peters beautifully explores loss, grief, hope, and the invisible tether that keeps families intact even when they are ripped apart.
A quiet and poignant debut from a writer to watch.”
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