Book Review: “The Berry Pickers” by Amanda Peters

“I found it strange that no word exists for a parent who loses a child. If children lose their parents, they are orphans. If a husband loses his wife, he’s a widower. But there’s no word for a parent who loses a child. I’ve come to believe that the event is just too big, too monstrous, too overwhelming for words. No word could ever describe the feeling, so we leave it unsaid.”

- The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters

When I first read about ‘The Berry Pickers’ I thought it was going to be a bit more…well, happier than it was. I am all for sad books but there were points I had to put this down and walk away from it because it got a bit heavy in the middle. There is something really upsetting about reading depressing books when you’re already beaten down a bit. I don’t think I’ve felt this way since I read ‘Anna Karenina’ in my teens. Be that as it may, this book was really very well-written and packed full of family drama. It felt very real. It was just so sad at some points and that bothers me more than it should because normally I love a sad book.

'The Berry Pickers' is about a family of berry pickers who one day, notice that their youngest member, a daughter named Ruthie, has gone missing. The book will spend decades revisiting her memory and the new youngest, her older brother Joe, will blame himself for not looking out for her - a memory that will haunt him. Meanwhile, a woman named Norma is growing up noticing that she doesn't look like her parents, or her aunt, and there are no pictures of her childhood. As we witness these two timelines unfold, the question is not really what happened - but why it happened at all. This is the story about how one woman's life destroyed the lives of many other people for the sake of wanting a child. And it doesn't stop there.

Let's get on to what made this book so sad. First of all, there are so many people who die in this book that you would think it was about 500 pages, but no - it is barely 300. The speed at which things happen is something odd, but the weirder thing is that there is so much grief in such a short space of time. For example: Norma loses her baby and it is absolutely horrifying to see her reaction. Not only that but she is also married to a man who is probably not the best for her. He is a selfish man who is also kind of emotionally useless and quickly becomes everyone's least favourite character in the novel.

Besides this we also have the arguments between other families which cause other troubles. When the children start dying before their parents it becomes apparent that there is much more than Ruthie's disappearance going on. Charlie and another family have a feud and this becomes more and more of a problem the closer Joe gets to his own realisation. It is a horrific family tragedy but honestly, I cannot say I was surprised because this book was meant to upset me.

The writing style does not make the sadness any better. The novel is littered with grief but also, alternating chapters between Norma and Joe are written in first person which makes it even more hard-hitting. So, for example when Norma loses her baby, we get to experience all of her emotions in first person. Yes, it is horrifying what she feels and the way she describes things but what is even more emotional is the breakdown of her marriage, which we see almost in real time. By the time he leaves, I don't think any reader misses him at all.

All in all, I feel like this book really upset me but it was so beautifully written that I cannot give it a fault on that part. On the whole, I enjoyed reading it because the storyline was interesting. For those of you who liked the novel Go as a River by Shelley Read, this is probably something you want on your reading list.