Caitlin | Book Therapy Philly

The Berry Pickers follows a Mi’kmaq family who lives in Nova Scotia and works a seasonal berry picking job in Maine each year. The story begins in the summer of 1962 when the family’s youngest daughter, Ruthie, tragically goes missing. The remainder of the novel proceeds to take a strong look at the grief and generational trauma that results within the family across time, leading to present day.

The storytelling succeeds in depicting the harsh reality of prejudice and dehumanization that Native American people have experienced and while this seems to be the point of the novel, I felt that by only focusing on the traumas of the family vs. other attributes too, it did not depict them as whole people and therefore did not create quite enough emotion around the novel’s events, which are based on a conglomerate of real-life experiences.

Also, half of the narrative follows Joe, Ruthie’s 2nd eldest brother, who was the last person to have seen her. Once again, by only focusing on Joe’s traumas I found him to be almost a caricature of a selfish, self-destructive man that somehow everyone in his life still fawns over, ie my least favorite type of person in life or literature.

Overall, The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters is a debut with a lot of potential that is a little too shallow in its depictions of *full* human life. I can typically gauge the depth of a book based off of the length and quality of conversation that my bookclub has around it and we petered off talking about this one (our July pick!) after about 15 minutes or so…

Amanda Peters has a new title, The Birthing Tree, being published this September and I will be very curious to hear the early reviews to see if her writing has grown in directions that lean more to my “person as a full human amongst life trauma” world view preferences.