The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters

This book is a story that unfolds through several narrators and starts with the disappearance of a 4 year old First Nation child. Joe, who was 6 at the time, narrates the unfolding of terrible events. His family was traveling down to Maine from their home in Canada, as they did every summer, to pick berries in the fields of Mr. Ellis, and one day their youngest family member wanders off and never returns. They look and look for Ruthie, but they have to return home without the youngest family member. The strength of the story lies in its understanding of how trauma spreads through a life and a family, and its depiction of the challenges facing Indigenous people. Two of Joe’s older siblings have been wrested out of the clutches of Indian boarding school, which the federal government forced them to attend to wipe out their languages and culture and assimilate them into White society. Then, in the years after Ruthie is kidnapped, the family loses a child to racist violence, and Joe disappears for decades. Though the plot is overly drawn out, nuanced characterizations benefit from all the space they have to develop. The author is of Mi’kmaq and settler ancestry, and she allows Joe to gradually reveal the way his guilt and rage over the loss of his siblings festered and erupted in alcoholism, domestic violence and flight within a framework that we can all understand if not relate to. It is a good story and it is well told.