by Amanda Peters ★★★★☆
In 1962, a family of Mi'kmas from Nova Scotia is engaging in an activity they had done every summer: traveling to Bangor, Maine and assisting for seven weeks with the berry harvest for that year. All is going as it typically does, until one morning they wake up to find that their youngest daughter, four-year-old Ruthie, has gone missing. When a frantic search turns up no clues (and no remains), the family is forced to carry on through their grief. What follows is their story.
Author Peters alternates chapter points of view between Joe, the youngest son, and Ruthie, who grows up in a wealthy white household under the name "Norma". The prologue establishes that Joe has late-stage lung cancer, and much of his story is told in the form of flashbacks or retellings of past events to friends and family members in his final days. He has spent most of his life filled with guilt at having been the last family member to speak with Ruthie, and that guilt festers into anger and self-hatred that lead him to a series of poor decisions. Ruthie/Norma, meanwhile, grows up with a lingering memory of something "other"; her new "parents" play it off as her "dreams", and while she has no solid memories of her time before she was taken, she has a lingering sense that she does not know the whole truth.
There is little mystery here -- we know where Ruthie ends up, and we are led to believe in the prologue that a reunion will take place. The only pieces of the puzzle unrevealed early are the details around Ruthie's disappearance and the path she will take to remembering who she is and to finding her family. As such, this is primarily a character-driven novel, and the impact that a tragic event like losing a child can have on a family forever.
The writing is better than average but relatively unremarkable and the plotting somewhat pedestrian. I do think Peters does a nice job of building characters with depth. We get to know Joe and Ruthie best through their role as dual narrators, but I also enjoyed Aunt June, Ruthie's "new mother's" sister, as a multi-layered and richly rendered addition to the story.
Overall, I enjoyed The Berry Pickers, but I'm a little surprised it landed at #2 on Amazon's Best Books of 2023. There's plenty that's good about it, but very little that's outstanding.