1n 1962, a family of Mi’kmaq tribe members from Nova Scotia travel to Maine for the summer to pick blueberries, as they have done for years. Near the end of this particular season, tragedy strikes when their youngest child, Ruthie, disappears without a trace one day. The local police are indifferent and the farmer pretty quickly insists that the family get back to work since their missing daughter “isn’t his problem.” Though the family keeps the search going for a long time, eventually they stop coming back to the berry farm, returning to Nova Scotia and going on with their lives as best they can, not knowing what became of their beloved daughter and sister.
(SPOILERS BELOW)
The Berry Pickers is narrated in alternating chapters by Joe and Norma. Joe is the next youngest sibling, and the last of the family to see Ruthie alive. He carried that guilt with him for years, as it eventually morphed into a perpetual anger at the world. He’s had a troubled, lonely life and has returned home only to find himself dying slowly, painfully, from cancer. Norma (seriously, stop reading now if you don’t want any spoilers) is the long-lost Ruthie, unaware at first of her past. Norma’s chapters follow her unusual life in her home with her parents, a local judge and his fraught, emotional wife. As a child, Norma is plagued by weird dreams she doesn’t understand, where her mother appears but somehow isn’t her mother, among other oddities. But when she tries to discuss them, her mother feigns a headache or some other illness which she manages to make Norma feel responsible for.
Norma’s home life is not loveless, exactly, but her “mother” Lenore is a manipulative, controlling woman who rarely lets Norma go outside except for school. Norma’s only outlet is her mother’s sister June. Aunt June shows compassion towards Norma, though she tries to get Norma to make allowances for her mother.
The reader’s early realization that Norma is Ruthie and had been kidnapped by the woman she knows as her mother creates an exquisite level of suspense for the bulk of the novel. As Norma slowly grows more suspicious of her unusual upbringing, the reader can hardly bear it, imagining the fallout from her eventual discovery of the truth.
It’s impossible to know how a person would react to such an enormous betrayal, so Peters should be granted a lot of latitude. However, I still felt like she fumbled the aftermath quite badly. Norma’s reaction didn’t read as particularly understandable or human. It turns this suspenseful drama into something more like a pat, “nice” story.