It’s only the beginning of the third quarter of 2025, yet I’m pretty sure I know what my favorite book is for this year.
The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters
This is Amanda’s debut novel and it won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Catapult published The Berry Pickers a couple of years ago. Still, the story takes place in the early 1960s, so I didn’t lose anything waiting a couple of years to read it.
Joe and his sister, Ruthie, get separated when Ruthie is just four years old. They grow up in vastly different environments.
Spoiler alert: Skip to the next paragraph if you don’t like any details of the story revealed. Norma is actually Ruthie. I understood this from the last sentence of the Prologue, so I don’t think it’s much of a reveal.The story flips back and forth between the present and the past, uncovering wounds and recovery and forgiveness through both Joe and Norma’s perspectives.
So why is The Berry Pickers my 2025 favorite?
- The novel has two voices: Joe’s and his sister’s, Ruthie. I love hearing stories from two perspectives.
- Amanda involves all five senses in her writing. This is something I work on when I write my novels. It’s not easy. When Amanda describes the memory of potatoes cooked over a campfire, I swear I can almost taste them.
- The pages are easy to read. When a writer from About.com asked to publish something I wrote, she described my writing as “easy.” I didn’t know how to take that. Now I do. The Berry Pickers chapters a bit long. Yet, I couldn’t put the book down until I’d read two chapters: One from Joe’s perspective, and one from Norma’s.
- Amanda draws upon stories her dad told her over and over again. He took her to Maine to show her the berry fields. I can only guess that’s because he was one of those berry pickers. I think personal stories are the best way to capture the mood of a time. It teaches us things about our past. More importantly, it teaches us some of the whys about what happened. How people felt, how society viewed thing.
- The Berry Pickers reminds us how we all carry pain from our childhood and it impacts how we move about in the world.
Fate is a trickster. He likes to set up all the cles just to see if you can put them together and make sense out of things you never thought to make sense of in the first place.
THe Berry Picker (page 67)
- Amanda is a beautiful wordsmith. I often paused an re-read a sentence of paragraph, so I could hold on to the feelings the writing evoked. Like this bit about marriage:
Marriage is a funny thing. There are so many people in the world, and you decide to commit the rest of your life, the rest of your emotional energy, to just one. You assume that the mysterious connection that ties you to one another will hold. A connection that can’t be trusted, one that probably manifests in that same mystical space where stories come from. A place that allows you to suspend your disbelief. Marriage assumes that you will bend and twist and adjust to one another. It assumes that your desires will forever be inter connected by the placement of a piece of gold around a finger…
One other thing, what we say matters, sometimes for a long time
Maybe Amanda planned this, and maybe she didn’t. Joe overhears someone say that his people make good berry pickers because they are sour. The person says it like it was something everyone knows. A fact. Joe’s a small boy when he hears this. Still, it echoes throughout his life. This reminds me of something that when I was berry picking in Michigan.
We go camping each year during blueberry season. The berries are easy to pick and within an hour, my crew of kids and grandkids can easily pick 15 pounds of berries. A couple of hours is about the limit, before the beach calls the kids back to camp.
One year, we overheard a group of women complaining about how difficult berry-picking is.
“It’s the way the Mexicans are built,” one woman said. “I’m sure that’s why they’re so good at it.”
It seemed like such an odd thing to say. We laughed because the berries practically fall off the bush by the handfuls. We jokingly wonder what unique physique might make picking easier than easy. Still, this ridiculous remark, resurfaces every year.
What we say can simmer in someone’s brain for the rest of their life. Especially so, when that someone is a child.
The Berry Pickers is available in paperback, hardcover, Kindle, and Audible. I’m sure you can get in the library, too. That’s where I got mine.
Have you read The Berry Pickers? What did you think? What’s your favorite read this year?