“…lost in a memory stirred alive by the moon.”
Amanda Peters’s debut The Berry Pickers (Catapult 2023) is a quiet triumph of a novel about grief, anger, loss, identity, and forgiveness. When I was a child, I asked for The Face on the Milk Carton for Christmas. (It’s one of a few books I remember receiving, right down to the tissue paper in the box.) If you’re not familiar, this middle grade book is about a young girl who sees her own face on a milk carton and the truth of her identity is then uncovered. The Berry Pickers brought this beloved middle grade book to my mind as both Ruthie and Janie have similar experiences, but Janie is found when she is 15; Ruthie isn’t found until she’s 54 – there are five decades of anger, confusion, lies, and a family that never gave up hope.
In the summer of 1962, a Mi’kmaq family arrives in Maine from Nova Scotia to pick blueberries. They come every summer, working the same fields for the same man. That summer, Joe is six, and the baby of the family, Ruthie, is four. Joe is the last to see her, and his life is forever scarred by that summer day he left her on the rock. The police won’t help them look because she’s Mi’kmaq. The landowner tells them they have to start picking and stop looking – it’s a real shame about your girl, but I’ll hire someone else if you don’t get to picking. They look for her for years, scanning the woods for bones and the faces of strangers for her eyes. They never give up.
In Maine, Norma grows up the very sheltered only child of an affluent judge and his peculiar wife. She’d come after a series of miscarriages and believed herself surrounded by ghost siblings. She dreams of the moon, and a brother named Joe. She dreams of her mother. She has an imaginary friend named Ruthie. Her dreams give her mother intense headaches, and Norma learns to push what she’ll eventually learn are memories to the dark corners of her mind. But she still can’t help but wonder what her parents aren’t telling her. She decides later that she was adopted, and that her birth family simply didn’t want her. She has no inkling that she’s Mi’kmaq or that she was stolen.
The novel follows Joe and Norma as they grow up. Joe is filled with a guilt that should never have been his to carry. That guilt breathes fire into his anger, and he leaves his family before his anger burns them. When the novel opens fifty years after Ruthie vanished, he’s surrounded by what’s left of his family and dying of cancer.
The novel excels in quiet moments & brief images. A name added to the family Bible. A doll made of socks still waiting for a little girl to come home. A stump. Nancy Drew and Louis L’Amour. The moon. It tastes sweet, sour and sticky on your lips – like a berry picked fresh from the bush, still warm from the sun.
Read this book.
*Thank you to publisher for gifting me this finished copy.
A Girl Named Tommi 