August Book Club Selection
The Book Club's September selection is The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters. Maine Public's "Virtual Book Club" will stream on the Maine Public's YouTube and Facebook page on Wednesday, September 25 at 7pm. Please have the book read by then! Our Appleton Library Book Club meeting for that book will be at the library on Tuesday, October 1 at 10:00 AM.
"The Berry Pickers"
By Amanda Peters
A four-year-old girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a tragic mystery that 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, is seen sitting on her favourite rock at the edge of a field before mysteriously vanishing. Her six-year-old brother, Joe, who was the last person to see Ruthie, is devastated by his sister’s disappearance, and her loss ripples through his life for years to come.
In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as an only child in an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant, while her mother is overprotective of Norma, who is often troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem to be too real to be her imagination. As she grows older, Norma senses there is something her parents aren’t telling her. Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she pursues her family’s secret for decades.
A stunning debut novel, The Berry Pickers is a riveting story about the search for truth, the shadow of trauma, and the persistence of love across time.
About the Author:
Amanda Peters is a mixed-race woman of Mi’kmaq and European ancestry, born and raised in the Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia.
In 2022, Amanda completed a Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indians Arts (IAIA) in New Mexico. In 2021, Amanda won the Indigenous Voices Award for her work of short fiction, Waiting for the Long Night Moon. She was also selected to participate in the 2021 Writers Trust of Canada Rising Stars Program by Metis poet and novelist, Katherena Vermette.
Her short fiction and non-fiction have been published in The Antigonish Review, Grain Magazine, The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Dalhousie Review, and Filling Station Magazine.
Amanda’s first novel, The Berry Pickers, was published this spring by HarperCollins in Canada and by Catapult in the US this autumn. The novel is shortlisted for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize in Canada, and for the Barnes and Noble Discover Prize and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction in the US.
