THE BERRY PICKERS by Amanda Peters

There is just not enough happening in this novel.  I guess you could say that it is long on characters and short on plot.  A four-year-old Indigenous girl from Nova Scotia named Ruthie disappears from a Maine berry farm in 1962 where her family works every year.  The family receives only cursory help from local law enforcement in searching for her, and that racial bias repeats itself when her older brother is killed in a fight, trying to protect a drunken man.  Ruthie then re-emerges as Norma with a white family, questioning why her skin is darker but receiving flimsy answers.  As an adult, her biological brother Sam recognizes her in Boston and calls to her by her birth name, which she recognizes, but her white mother’s sister whisks her away.  The only real mystery here is how Ruthie/Norma got from point A (her real family) to point B (her white family).  That’s all I really wanted to know.  The writing is good, with a few grammatical annoyances that may or may not have been intentional, but the book overall just did not offer any other incentive to keep reading.  A side plot involves her biological brother Joe who becomes volatile and then a wanderer as he deals with guilt related to both siblings’ deaths, but his story is just not that compelling.  Neither is Norma’s, for that matter, given that she never makes an effort to find out her true story until she overhears a conversation that shocks her into reality.