Synopsis:

A four-year-old Mi’kmaq girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a tragic mystery that haunts the survivors, unravels a community, and remains unsolved for nearly fifty years.

July 1962. A Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia 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.

Rating:

Review:

I was interested in this one because it got a lot of buzz last year. I saw it win a bunch of awards and was talked about all over the book stratosphere. So I picked it up as my audiobook of the week. Though, truth be told, I have been so busy with work and children that audiobooks are about the only thing I have had time to read lately. Anyway, on to the book.

This book was so wonderfully written. It was striking and beautiful. The plot immediately introduces us to Ruthie and her family. They are an Indigenous family from Nova Scotia who travel to Maine every year to assist with harvesting blueberries. Except this year, Ruthie disappeared. They saw her sitting on a rock near the edge of the field and then she was gone. One second she was there and the next second she wasn’t. The police are called and searches commence but it doesn’t last long. They’re migrant workers, Indigenous, no one really cares. The police tells them that maybe their daughter just wandered off, they’ll likely never find her and she’s gone. The property owner sympathizes with their desperation to find her but reminds them that he has work to be done, he can’t afford for them to be searching the woods for Ruthie anymore. It’s heartbreaking and also very realistic, particularly for the timeframe. She is a girl who is easily forgotten.

We are also introduced to Norma. She grew up with a very exacting and manipulative mother. Her mother was a bit paranoid. Norma was rarely allowed to leave the house and definitely not to talk to other people. Honestly, it wasn’t hard to connect the pieces of the story here. I am not entirely sure it was supposed to be a mystery. The real story is how the truth comes to light.

I absolutely loved this book. It might make the short list of one of my favorite books ever. My only complaint was that it got a little too wordy in the middle. I started to lose interest because Norma just wasn’t really that interesting until later in the story. But despite the laggy middle it recovered quickly into a heartbreaking ending. I was left in tears for hours. I still feel a little weepy thinking about the ending of the book again. This is a wonderful book, I highly recommend it.

“Over the decades, the walls of this house have been torn down and built again in different places and painted in different colors, but a closet still holds a very old pair of girl’s boots with the head of a doll sticking out of one of them on the top shelf,” – The Berry Pickers