Blueberries, a missing child, a Supreme Court justice

It’s been a while since my last article, and because I read a lot, books have been accumulating like the recent snows. Too many to tell about, really, but I will do my best. So many good books, so little time and space.

I picked up “The Berry Pickers” in an airport bookstore while making my way to Florida last month. I’d seen it mentioned several times on the Historical Fiction Lovers Facebook page (I tried to boycott Facebook. I really did, but I so missed the lively community there that I am back on.) along with many positive comments, so when I saw it on the shelf, I figured it was probably a safe bet.

And then there was its cover. I know, I know, you can’t judge a book by its cover, but when you see this one, you will see what I mean. The cover is blueberries. How could I resist?

“The Berry Pickers” takes place in the early 60s and begins with the musings of a man named Joe: “The sun is beginning to fade outside the window, and I am marveling at how I’ve been shaped and molded by women, even though I was absent from them most of my life.”

Joe is going on about his hurting legs. He’s no spring chicken and clearly not in the best of health, when his sister Mae walks into his room and says, “Joe, there’s someone here to see us. And I think we might have some catching up to do.”

That line hooked me right away. Turns out Joe has a missing sister, the family’s youngest child, Ruthie, last seen sitting on a rock at the edge of a berry field near Bangor, Maine. The family was there to pick blueberries for the season, a tradition of Indigenous Mi’kmaq workers from Nova Scotia.

Ruthie was one of two girls in a family of five and the family searched for her for six weeks. But to no avail. The berry fields were empty and the potatoes had all been pulled from the ground when the family packed up camp and drove off in their truck.

“No one spoke about her,” Joe recounts, “but when we passed the small stone where I saw her last, a sandwich in her hand, I just knew that we were leaving Ruthie behind.”

Over the course of the novel, which is simply told, yet in a way that evokes both deep emotions and a strong sense of scenery and place, we learn more about Joe, his family, the Mi’kmaq berry pickers, and more about the mystery of Ruthie and what befell her that summer day in Maine. The pull of love and memory, the importance of intuition, serendipity and the deep pain of loss and injustice are all alive and singing in this short, very good book.

Amanda Peters is a Canadian writer from Nova Scotia. “The Berry Pickers,” her debut novel, received the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the 2024 Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence, along with other prizes. Peters’ heritage is a mix of European and Mi’kmaq. She was born and raised as a member of the Glooscap First Nation. Her perspective is important and unique.

I hate spoilers so I’m being careful to say very little about the plot of “The Berry Pickers” and the unspooling of the mystery of Ruthie. Suffice it to say, I found the story moving, straightforward and incredibly hard to put down.

Poignant and compelling. Highly recommend. Great for vacation reading.

Another excellent read (or listen — the author reads the book herself) is “Lovely One,” a memoir released in September 2024 by U.S. Supreme Court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Though the book has apparently gotten some flak for not being as sharp as some of her judicial writing, I found it to be down to earth, wise, warm, honest and illuminating. I guess I am thankful it bears little resemblance to legal writing, as that would likely render it not only unpleasant but entirely inscrutable to this mostly fiction reader.

Brown’s excellent memoir tells about her life, from her grandparents and parents, to her days growing up in Miami, to her years at Harvard, to encountering her soulmate Patrick, to having children, but it is speckled with super-interesting tidbits and detours, such as details of her work analyzing sentencing and plea bargaining, and the time she helped investigate the unjustly harsh sentence of her uncle, and how she finally found a way to care for her hair in a way that’s manageable, practical and natural, and about what it was like to meet, befriend and become engaged to her best friend, “a quintessential Boston Brahmin,” as she says — sixth generation in his family to graduate from Harvard.

“By contrast,” Ketanji Brown Jackson said, “I am only the second generation in my family to go to any college, and I am fairly certain that if you traced my family lineage back past my grandparents — who were raised in Georgia, by the way — you would find that my ancestors were slaves on both sides.”

Jackson is open and honest and so straightforward in this memoir it makes me wish she lived closer so we could be friends. I can see us: cross-country skiing at Shelburne Farms, animatedly chatting about this and that, grabbing a decaf latte at Village Wine and Coffee, catching a movie at Majestic 10.

She speaks with striking candor about the difficulties of raising a brilliant but seriously challenged and challenging daughter who was finally diagnosed with autism. She is forthright about the pain of being at a loss as to how to help her child find belonging and happiness, and unflinchingly honest about her regret vis a vis some of the choices she made for her child while not yet understanding the forces at play.

In this greatly troubling time, living in a great country pummeled by an ongoing coup, in the middle of a constitutional crisis, news of fresh trespasses, breaches, plane crashes and horrors assailing us like hailstones every five minutes, this book has been a calming, reassuring antidote. Ketanji Brown Jackson is brilliant, ambitious, clear-eyed, incisive and stunningly accomplished, and yet her warmth, honesty, humility, common sense and passion for justice and a level playing field come through like a colorful banner in a blinding blizzard.

It has been a lifesaver for me these past weeks to be able to switch from the radio to Audible and hear Jackson’s reassuring, loving, grounded, caring, cheerful, wise, no-nonsense, illuminating words, knowing that this shining star of a person is sitting in real life and real time on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Knowing she is there gives me the feeling that we might be alright somehow.

“My hope,” she writes, “is that the trials and triumphs of my journey as a daughter, sister, wife, mother, litigator, and friend will stand as a testament for young women, people of color, and strivers everywhere, especially those who nourish outsized ambitions and believe with stubborn faith in the possibility of achieving them. I want to encourage these bold dreamers not to be turned aside by adversity, because life will always present challenges. We must allow them to teach and fortify us and help us build confidence in our ability to find a way though.

“In the end, we must trust the path we choose to walk, anchored by a firm sense of our potential, inspired by the people with whom we surround ourselves, and bolstered by our willingness to keep on.”

And hear this: “We must not choose harsh words that tear people down. We must choose kind words that lift people up.”

If you need some comfort these days — some reassurance, some inspiration, some evidence of that long arc of the moral universe bending towards justice — read or listen to “Lovely One” (which is, by the way, the English translation of the word ketanji).

Take heart, keep the faith and stick with the winners. We’re gonna get through this.