From the Bookshelf of Nothing But Reading Challenges…

The Berry Pickers

Amanda Peters

Start date: June 1, 2025

Finish date: June 30, 2025

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Jul 13, 2025 Bonnie rated it liked it

Shelves: 2023-books, historical-fiction-post-wwii, indigenous-literature

Although initially positioned as a mystery of what happened to a 4-year-old Mi’kmaq girl who disappears in 1962, it is not a mystery. It becomes immediately clear in the second chapter what happened to her: a white couple took her, and raised her as their own. It's not even really a whydunnit, because the reasoning is also immediately clear: after a series of miscarriages, her adoptive mother decides kidnapping someone else's child is justified, and her loved ones (husband and sister) go along w Although initially positioned as a mystery of what happened to a 4-year-old Mi’kmaq girl who disappears in 1962, it is not a mystery. It becomes immediately clear in the second chapter what happened to her: a white couple took her, and raised her as their own. It's not even really a whydunnit, because the reasoning is also immediately clear: after a series of miscarriages, her adoptive mother decides kidnapping someone else's child is justified, and her loved ones (husband and sister) go along with it and cover it up to make her happy. It's a little baffling that in the 1960s the couple never consider formal adoption, instead of, you know, kidnapping. It was much easier to adopt a child in 1962, especially for affluent, connected (the husband is a judge), Christian white couples who were the prime beneficiaries of a system where (white) teenage mothers were pressured/coerced/forced to give up their babies for "legal" adoption. Just read Grady Hendrix's latest, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, which was set in 1970. Or the nonfiction The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade which discusses how between 1945 and 1973, an unprecedented 1.5 million babies were surrendered under tremendous social pressure.

But, anyway, this woman and her loved ones decide that kidnapping a child is an acceptable route. The girl, Ruthie, is renamed Nora. She gets one of the POVs of this book. The other POV is Joe, her older brother who due to the trauma of losing his baby sister (when he was the last one to see her), and other tragedies, falls into alcoholism and anger. This book spans 50 years in about 300 pages, so the time flies by without really digging into the many issues this book raises (institutional racism, domestic violence, generational trauma, PTSD, etc.). I felt sad for the characters, particularly Ruthie and Joe's parents, who are a good-hearted and loving couple who experience tragedy after tragedy through no fault of their own. But I didn't feel particularly connected to any of the characters.

I almost DNF'd a couple times because I wasn't feeling the book, but I wanted the emotional payoff of Ruthie/Norma FINALLY learning the truth (she knows something is up and her parents lied to her about her past, but doesn't push to connect the dots or force any confrontation for literal decades). The emotional payoff was somewhat satisfying, but not fully, and I kept wanting more out of the story then it could provide. ...more

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