The Berry Pickers: A Novel [B1854-HC]

2024 HCDJ  in excellent condition. Winner of Barnes & Noble Discover Prize and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. A four-year-old Mi'kmaq girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a mystery that will haunt the survivors, unravel a family, and remain unsolved for nearly fifty years. "A stunning debut about love, race, brutality, and the balm of forgiveness." -People. 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. "An unforgettable exploration of grief, love, and kin," (The Boston Globe), this show stopping 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.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "Wow, I mean just wow. This book opened me up to a whole new world of perspective. This both crushed my heart AND inflated it. The writing was absolutely beautiful, even in its saddest moments. All of the characters were insanely complex, so real, and so disastrously human, it made me love them so much. For a story with pretty much no action, and no romance (unless u squint SUPER hard), this was an addicting read for me."; "A beautiful story. A little slow in the middle, but needed to build the characters - and then a beautiful end."; "Very good. Definitely recommend. A great debut novel!"; "Telling a good story seems to be going out of fashion, so it was a true pleasure to read this thoughtful book. I will say no more because to do so with any meaning would spoil the pleasure of reading. If you enjoy a good story, written well, you should read this."