The Berry Pickers

By: Amanda Peters

Narrated by: Aaliya Warbus, Jordan Waunch

Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins

Publisher's summary

A four-year-old Mi’kmaq girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a tragic mystery that haunts the survivors, unravels a family, and remains unsolved for nearly fifty years

July 1962. Following in the tradition of Indigenous workers from Nova Scotia, a Mi’kmaq family arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family’s youngest child, vanishes. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at the edge of a berry field. Joe will remain distraught by his sister’s disappearance for years to come.

In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant, her mother frustratingly overprotective.

Norma is often troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem more like memories than imagination. As she grows older, Norma slowly comes to realize there is something her parents aren’t telling her. Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she will spend decades trying to uncover this family secret.

For fans of The Vanishing Half and Woman of Light, this showstopping debut by a vibrant new voice in fiction is a riveting novel about the search for truth, the shadow of trauma, and the persistence of love across time.

©2023 Amanda Peters (P)2023 HarperCollinsPublishers

basic

I felt the writing was very basic. However, both of the narrators were so poor. it was hard to assess whether the issue was with the writing or just the narration.

Interesting plot

Good story good performance . Interesting location and well developed characters and a satisfying conclusion. Thanks for an enjoyable read.

Beautiful, poignant story of loss and redemption

Well written and performed. I loved these characters and felt their loss and pain and rejoiced at their redemption. Setting was a part of the world I know little about so it was enlightening. Being from the south, it provided me with an interesting perspective the Mi’kmaq.

Pain and Joy intermingled

Consequences are too often ignored when a selfish person acts spontaneously. The development of these lives impacted me at a base level. Forgiveness came from the wrong sources and yet, these people are the generous ones in all life experiences, in my admittedly limited view.

Berry good!

Good story with a new twist. The narrator in the beginning was not good, no animation in the voice but it got better.

Good story. Annoying narrator

The female narrator mispronounces so many words that it’s distracting. “Miss Happen” for mishapen; “Brown_stone” for brownstone; “cotton candy-dress” for cotton-candy dress. Ugh!!

Terrible reading of good book

The premise of this story, characters, and plot were well done. The male reader mispronounced local place names and gave characters southern accents rather than northern ones. The female reader did better with pronunciation but also messed up regional accents. Hard to get lost in the story with such glaring errors in the book itself narration. Disappointed.

Moving Story

What a beautiful and moving story of loss but also of love. Couldn’t put it down.

Amazing. Not my typical book. 

I started reading this book for a bookclub, and within the first few chapters, I could not put it down. I finished the whole thing in one day. Amazing writing. The way it captures the emotions and situations of the story is just dumbfounding and captivsting. Like every good book… You can play it out like a movie in your head. Highly recommend. 

Sincere and sad

It has a good story but is at times painful and very sad. Good ending. Story held my attention.