The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters comes across as a very book clubby book that in spite of its dark premise delivers a strangely sterile tale.

Thank you to Penguin and NetGalley for the ARC!

Wow, this book is incredible. A beautifully told story about family, love, loss, hope and grief. I absolutely devoured it. An emotional but gripping and addictive read. Highly recommend!

Ruthie, a 4 year old Native American girl, disappears while her family are doing seasonal work picking berries in Maine. No trace of her is found. Her 6 year old brother Joe is the last person to see her and is plagued by guilt. The novel alternates between the life of Joe and that of Norma, as Ruthie has been renamed by the family who took her.

The book is not full of incident but instead tells the story of how the kidnapping affects both the victim (who is largely unaware of what has happened as time goes on) and the family left behind. It's also the story of life for those who cannot rely on the police or society to help them due to their race.

I loved this book and finished it in a day. The characters were so real and the story heartbreaking but never crossed over to sentimental. Everything made sense for actions by the characters and even though they weren't all likeable, they remained sympathetic. It's a debut novel but so confident and well written, a really excellent read.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an advance copy in return for an honest review.

#TheBerryPickers #NetGalley

It is the early 1960s, and an indigenous family from Nova Scotia has arrived in Maine for some berry-picking work, as they do every year. But this year is different, in the worst possible way. Their youngest child, only 4 years old, goes missing a few weeks later.

The police are contacted, but she is never found, and her 6 year old brother, who was the last person to see her is haunted for years by Ruthie's disappearance and his own misplaced guilt. Struggling with cancer decades later, Joe still wonders what happened to his sister, and why the family members' lives turned out the way they did in the aftermath of her loss.

Meanwhile, Norma is raised by an affluent white Maine family, but her home life is not the way that she would want it. An overly-protective mother and a emotionally remote father make for an uncomfortable combination.

Things are not helped by her darker skin, and recurrent dreams and vague memories of a different life. Her mother is quick to lovingly dismiss these questions of hers as imaginary concerns, but Norma is not entirely convinced by her efforts.

This story is not a mystery about a little girl's disappearance, but more an examination of an indigenous family's experience with racism, disregard and loss. In parts it feels a little dramatic, but the historical truth that lies behind the story is hardly less so.

The continuing epidemic of missing indigenous women is part of a longer history of Native American and First Nations children being taken away from their parents and communities, and removed to residential schools and adoptive homes in order to make them more "civilised". It is past time that these narratives became part of mainstream literature, and this book is both very readable and a good contribution to that.

Trigger Warnings: miscarriage, kidnapping, abuse, child labour, death

This book fully engrossed me from beginning to end. It is a dual POV where Norma and Joe tell their lives between past to present of what happened the day of and the years after Joe's little sister Ruthie went missing. Their lives were full of love, heartache, tragedy and hope.

In many years to come this could easily be one of those books that become a 'classic' in literature. Beautiful writing, beautiful characters, development and storytelling. Highly recommend.

4.5/5

A beautiful premise but I’m afraid the book failed to grab my attention. Perhaps the reader is at fault here rather than the writer.

This was a different read for me but I enjoyed this book overall. I would definitely read more books by Amanda Peters in the future.