I liked this book for the first 80 ish pages, and then it just sort of fell flat,  though it had the bones of a good story. The descriptions of the Maine and Nova Scotian landscapes, the berry farm, and the rural communities were often well written. 

The berry pickers are a Nova Scotian Mi’kmaq family who travel to Maine each summer to harvest blueberries and other crops as many Indigenous people have done. But in the summer of 1962, the family’s four-year-old daughter Ruthie disappears, leaving her parents and four older siblings to live with a void and grief and no explanation. The next oldest, Joe, was the last to see her, and this loss wrecks much of his life. 

Half of the story is narrated by Joe, recounting his life, his grief, and his poor decisions while preparing for his own death from cancer. Joe’s narration is the stronger voice in the story. We feel this loss and the way it spirals his anger and propels his drinking. 

The other voice is Norma, the girl with dark skin and white overprotective parents–and questions about why there are no photos of her before the age of four. For the reader, the mystery is solved in chapter two, so it’s a bit painful to watch Norma/Ruthie struggle her whole life knowing something is off but she’s not sure what, though her earliest dreams are of a little girl named Ruthie and her brother Joe–dreams her mother told her were “just silly dreams.” 

Both Norma and her mom felt like two dimensional characters, making both of them distant and hard to care about, whereas Joe’s family felt real and present and developed on a deeper level. 

It’s unfortunate that the writing was too often shallow and flat because the premise of this story is deep and important: a White woman with a history of miscarriages feels entitled to grab a child sitting alone by the side of the road and take her home, saving the child from “abandonment.”

Uprooting indigenous children from their family, culture, language, and community was a violence committed against generations of native families, and while this story is a different take on it, it amounts to the same core idea that some people are seen as less valuable than others, thus justifying the act of stealing another mother’s child.