The Berry Pickers—Reader's Guide and Book Club Kit (Amanda Peters)

The Berry Pickers is a quiet, devastating novel about a Mi'kmaq child taken from a blueberry field in 1962 and the fifty years of grief, guilt, and misdirected living that follow.  Two narrators tell the story over decades: Joe, the six-year-old boy who was the last person to see his sister before she vanished from a Maine blueberry field, and Norma, who grows up in a white household in Maine haunted by fragments of a life she doesn't remember living.

Amanda Peters won the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for this debut—and if your book club is still thinking about it days after finishing, this kit gives you a real conversation to have about it—without hours of prep.

What makes this kit different

Most guides stop at plot summary and generic discussion questions. This one connects the novel's emotional core to actual psychology—ambiguous loss, infantile memory, fragmented identity—so your group has something concrete to dig into, not just feelings to describe. The kit also includes a dedicated Historical Context chapter on the Sixties Scoop, the era of state-sanctioned Indigenous family separation that the novel is built around, because understanding that history changes what the book feels like to discuss.

Who this is for:

• Book clubs that want a conversation that goes somewhere—not just "did you like it?" but the harder questions about guilt, forgiveness, and who gets to grieve
• Readers drawn to Indigenous storytelling, Mi'kmaq culture, and the history of forced assimilation in North America
• Fans of Brit Bennett, Michelle Good, or William Kent Krueger who want to understand why this book hit the way it did
• Anyone sitting with a book hangover and looking for a way back into what made it so affecting

Digital download details

This is a printable PDF. No physical product will be shipped. After purchase, you'll receive a download link via email. Printing on cardstock or thick paper is recommended for the bookmarks. Licensed for personal and book club use.