I feel like I was misled into believing that The Berry Pickers is a mystery novel. It is a mystery, for the characters in the novel, but for the reader there is no mystery as to what happened to a four-year-old Indigenous child that goes missing. I feel some disappointment with this novel because I love a good mystery, but The Berry Pickers turned out to be an emotional story about family and trauma.

In 1962, a Mi’kmaw family from Nova Scotia travels to Maine to pick berries for the summer, as they have done for years, but this summer will be different because the family’s youngest child, four-year-old Ruthie, vanishes without a trace. Ruthie’s disappearance has a profound effect on her older brother, Joe, who was six years old at the time. Joe is further traumatized when, years later during another summer of picking berries in Maine, his older brother Charlie dies. Joe blames himself for both events because he was the last person to see Ruthie before she went missing and Charlie before he was killed.

The Berry Pickers is told through the alternating perspectives of Joe and Norma, who is Ruthie renamed by the white couple who raises her. Before you come at me, I have not spoiled anything for you. It is obvious that Norma is Ruthie, you just get to spend the entire book waiting for Joe and Norma to figure it out.

Joe is dying of cancer as he reflects upon his life since Ruthie went missing. Consumed by his anger at his own impotence in preventing Ruthie from going missing and Charlie from being killed, Joe turns to drinking and self-sabotage. Believing that his family is better off without him, Joe heads west across Canada to live a solitary existence and spends decades punishing himself for things beyond his control, before finally heading home to his family to die.

Norma grows up with the privileged existence of a white person, but her extremely overprotective mother makes her childhood oppressive, and she never quite feels like she belongs in her family. She has vague memories of another life that her parents dismiss as dreams, and when she asks why her skin is so much darker than her parents in the summer, they tell her it is because of her Italian grandfather, which she eventually learns is a lie. But Norma never pushes her parents too hard for the truth because it brings on one of her mother’s infamous headaches.

The Berry Pickers is about the erasure of Indigenous identity and the fight to reclaim it. The suspense in the story is supposed to come from whether Norma will learn who she really is in time to reunite with her brother Joe before he dies. Every once in a while I do not mind reading a book that has no surprises, so long as the characters get the endings that they deserve. Even though I found Joe to be selfish at times, I could empathize with the pain of his losses and wanted him to have closure before he died. Norma aka Ruthie was robbed of a happy life with her real family, and the white characters in the novel knew this, so of course there must be rectification, otherwise I was going to throw hands. Despite the lack of suspenseful storytelling, I would recommend reading this novel if you are looking for a sentimental story with a good ending.