A young girl from the Mi’kmaq tribe goes missing in the berry fields of Maine. This horrific tragedy follows her family for years to come, specifically haunting Joe, her older brother, and the last person to see her before she vanishes. Miles away, a young girl grows up in an affluent family, distraught with recurring dreams and nightmares about a life she shouldn’t know. With an emotionally distant father and an overbearing mother, she grows up feeling weighed down and unhappy. The story follows her as well as Joe, in a tale about family, heartache, and native identity.
The Berry Pickers is an immersive literary fiction debut novel. While the plot itself was solid, the story seemed underdeveloped and surface-level. The characters were flat and in some cases, hard to empathize with. The middle section of the story was shockingly slow for such a fast-paced central idea. The author tackled many hard-hitting themes: from loss, to deception, to violence. While these are important things to discuss, I felt that the author did not go deep enough on each of these issues. Peters’ novel had ok prose, but the plot was not enough to balance out the okay writing.
Her writing at some points felt more like writing for a chick-lit novel, rather than a provocative novel about native struggles. Peters has very promising ideas, and I have a feeling that her next novel will be much better. While it was not particularly my taste, The Berry Pickers was extremely well received by the public.
Joe’s character very quickly became insufferable. In my opinion, it is hard to redeem a character after domestic abuse, being an absent father, and abandoning your family. To me, it felt like he was a much less interesting character than Ruthie, since the whole time it just felt like he was angry, which became irritating very quickly. I actually almost stopped reading the book altogether because of how annoying I found Joe, but only stuck it out because I wanted to read about the family reunions.
Pretty much all of the main characters in Ruthie’s life, aside from Alice, also felt unredeemable to me. Yet, we are supposed to believe that Ruthie still feels love and tenderness towards her parents, after they kidnapped her away from her real family. One of the most interesting characters to me was Ruthie’s mom (the one that kidnapped her). She was a really good example of a narcissistic mother, and her influence on Ruthie’s psyche was very interesting to read.
I didn’t like that Aunt June was the one that told Ruthie about her true past, only because her mother and father had died before they could come clean. While I do believe that her mother would never tell Ruthie the truth, I hoped at least that June would break down and come clean because of her own conscience, not just because she was the last one left.
I would like for the author to have explored deeper the feelings of finding your true birth family and the mixed feelings of resentment and love for the family that raised her, since it is such a unique scenario. I also wish she discussed more about how her new-found Mi’kmaq identity impacted her.
Overall, I feel like the book was ok. It wasn’t the best book I have read this year, but it also wasn’t the worst. I understand how it would appeal to a lot of people, because it is a deeply emotional novel. For me, I enjoyed the beginning parts of the novel, and I felt that the rest sort of fell flat. I will be keeping an eye out for Amanda Peters’ next novel since I really wanted to enjoy this book.