Berry Pickers

I started crying the last 20-30 pages of this story. You figure out early on in the book where this story is going to go, but it was the end that I felt the tears flow. It is a story of family, love, loss, anger, lies, cover-ups, death, and hope.

I do recommend this books, but I have things to say that really require the spoiler tag.

I have learned a lot about transnational adoption in the past few years someone who was adopted and transported halfway around the world to another family. This book is not about adoption. It is out and out kidnapping, but the transnational adoption involves child trafficking and is a big business. It is also pulling children away from their own community for someone's profit. There is no profit here for some business - it is just one woman who thinks it is OK to take another person's child just like that to fulfil her own selfish needs - but the same sense of loss and erasure of one's own identity is very present in both the adoption industry and in this kidnapping. I think Lenore was a terrible woman. Not only did she kidnap Ruthie, she then proceeded to smother her with a perverse sort of love that restricted Ruthie/Norma's life in so many ways. When she meets her own family after five decades apart, she encounters more laughter in that family in those few days, than she ever experienced in the home she was raised in. Norma was given a decent education and was in a secure middle-class family, which fulfils dreams of white saviourism - giving some "poor abandoned/neglected/poverty-stricken" child a decent life. The home she grows up in gives only oppressive vibes. Noticing laughter as being a hallmark of her own family strikes me as so sad, and highlights how awful Lenore was in kind of hiding Ruthie/Norma from the world as much as she could.

All of this is to say, I think it is fine if this book doesn't touch on politics that much. It is really a story about how Joe and Ruthie/Norma feel in their lives. Joe was running away all of his life. Both are burdened with a mountain of guilt, which they don't deserve. That in itself is worthy of focus in this book. I think the reader can put two and two together themselves and see the racism and homophobia that exist in the society that Joe and Ruthie/Norma live in. This story is here to tell us how Joe's life and Ruthie's life developed after such a horrible thing separated them for decades.

Ruthie/Norma asks Mae whether she should have been aware that she was Indian far earlier in her life. I think Mae is right when she explains what is basically systematic racism and internalised racism. Lenore had trained Norma throughout her childhood to avoid issues that brought on "mommy's headaches. This sort of thing can happen, and the person involved can help to erase their own identity over time in one way or another. Again, the issue of identify is only touched on briefly, but I think the reader can do the math here, too. I am white so this is pure speculation on my part, but I think this is an OK analysis of this particular question based on what I have learned from listening to people who say they have experienced internalised racism. I apologise if I have gotten this wrong.

I think the ending had signs of healing with Ruthie and Leah burying Joe's ashes by the cabin where Ruthie and Joe had lived when they were brutally separated. I can see Ruthie and Leah growing close with Leah a willing replacement for Sarah, Ruthie's unborn daughter. Not a stolen replacement, but a relationship that will grow organically and voluntarily built on love for a flesh-and-blood relative who was in their lives for too short a time.

I read this book for a bookclub that I am in, but I started and finished it after the official reading period due to an extremely heavy workload. We were given about two months to read it in, but I could never have handled that. I read this in about 2.5 days. It was a page-turner. Not a page-turner like you find in a thriller, but a page-turner because the story just flowed and swept me up into this world with the beautiful storytelling.

For additional background for this story, here's an article about blueberry-picking in Maine over the years: www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/keeping-spirit-maines-wild-blueberry-harvest-alive-180984493/ This article was shared in my bookclub.