Let’s end the year with one of the best of the year. “The Berry Pickers” by Amanda Peters is many things; it’s a mystery, a family drama, and a really good read.
The story has two narrators — Joe and Norma — and is told alternately from their points of view. Joe is part of a close-knit family of indigenous people called the Mi’kmaw, First Nations people native to Northeast Canada. His “Indian” family comes from Nova Scotia each year to work as itinerant field workers in Maine.
One day as the family members are working in the field, little Ruthie, the youngest at age 4, goes missing. The family is frantic, all of them searching everywhere. The police are called in, but they couldn’t care less. The unsympathetic anti-Indian officer tells them, “Not much more I can do … You let us know when you find her. … If you were so concerned about the girl, you’d have taken better notice.” To add insult to their tragedy, because the family lost a child, the government wants to take away the rest of the children, to do “what’s best for them.”
The family and the other field workers look seemingly everywhere for her, for hours, days, weeks, but “couldn’t find a single trace of her,” as Joe, one of her brothers, tells us. Providing details, he says, “It’s funny what you remember when something goes wrong. Something that would never stick in your memory on an ordinary day gets stuck there permanent.”
All his life, Joe blames himself for her loss, thinking if only he’d watched her more closely she’d still be with them. He never accepts that his sister might be dead and he never gives up his search for her. “Ruthie wasn’t there, … but we felt her in the walls, in the extra chair at the dinner table and in the things that belonged to her.” His ongoing guilt will lead him to a rather dysfunctional life.
Meanwhile, the second narrator, Norma, tells us her experience. We know, though she doesn’t, that she is the missing Ruthie. Since the age of 4 or 5, she tells us, she has had recurring dreams, featuring “the face of a woman who wasn’t my mother but had my mother’s face.” In the dream “I heard a laugh and I knew it was my brother’s, which is strange since I am an only child, … knowing “that my house was not my house. Nothing was where it was supposed to be. No one was who they were supposed to be.”
She goes on, in some very pretty writing: “In my dark dream, the sky was black except for a blue halo around the moon. … The moon was bright, and the halo was so blue that my eyes couldn’t fix on any one star. Everything around it was absorbed into the light.”
Her mother tells her she’s just mistaken: “You’re confused. … Norma, it’s just a dream, only a dream. It’s just a dream. It’s nothing more than a silly dream. Only a dream.”
Norma says, “Fate is a trickster. He likes to set up all the clues just to see if you can put them together and make sense out of things you never thought to make sense of in the first place.” At the age of 14, she finds family photos, but why isn’t she in them? “I was missing when I should have been there.” She asks why and her parents tell her all her baby photos were burned in a house fire. Because her Native American skin turns dark in the sun, she asks, “Why am I so brown?” and her parents explain that an ancestor was Italian. Her parents are loving but don’t like it when she asks questions. Will she ever find out the truth?
In my favorite line from the book, Joe’s father tells him, “Be kind. … You never know when you might need kindness from people.”
The author is of Mi’kmaq ancestry, which is why the descriptions of family life feel authentic. This is a beautifully written book, but some of the back-and-forth-in-time in the narration bothered me. And there are definitely triggers for any reader who’s lost a child in any way.
Another current book is a mystery-thriller about a little girl who goes missing and returns on her own: “Please Tell Me” by Mike Omer. Everybody’s happy that she’s back home, but she seems scared all the time and she won’t talk anymore. When she’s sent to a psychologist, she starts describing to the therapist (using dolls, not words) startling crimes that may or may not have happened. What happened to her? What did she see?
There are page-turning plot twists and quite a bit of violence, but it isn’t drawn out, and the little girl isn’t physically hurt.
For another book about a missing child but with a very different outcome, read “The Deep End of the Ocean” by Jacquelyn Mitchard, which was the first selection of Oprah’s Book Club.
Happy reading!
Mary Louise Ruehr is a books columnist for The Portager. Her One for the Books column previously appeared in the Record-Courier, where she was an editor.