Evening Book Club

This month the Book Club will discuss The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters.

Peters' debut combines narrative skill and a poignant story for a wonderful novel to which many readers will gravitate. In 1962, an Indigenous Mi'kmaq family is in Maine to pick summer blueberries when their youngest child, four-year-old Ruthie, disappears. Her six-year-old brother, Joe, saw her last. Told in alternating, first-person chapters from Joe and a narrator called Norma, the novel follows the painful reverberations of Ruthie's disappearance across five decades. Peters wisely never makes the reader wonder if Norma is Ruthie; we know that she is, which allows more compelling questions to come into focus. How much do Joe's subsequent life events and choices trace back to this first major trauma? Is his lifelong guilt justified? How does Norma/Ruthie reconcile love for the white mother who stole her from her birth mother and for the white aunt who saved her from a lonely childhood but knew the secret all along? The story is told in braided strands, and it is a testament to Peters' ability that both strands fascinate. Indigenous stories like this matter, and while little is easy for Peters' characters, in the end, for all of them—even for those who stole a small child—there is hope. 

Newcomers are welcome to attend the book club. No registration is necessary and you may attend as many or as few meetings as you like.  The group is moderated by a librarian. Copies of the book are available upon request at the front desk starting one month before the meeting.