thank you to soft skull press and amanda peters for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

something about this book hollowed me out and rung me dry, like a rotting cabin out behind a berry field. like a season come and gone with no answers. the berry pickers is a gut wrenching story told in retrospect by two narrators, joe and norma, who have both lived different kinds of hard lives. weaving through their story is a constant thread of loss, guilt, and grief. joe can’t let go of his past which is eating him alive and norma’s is rapidly catching up with her after haunting her as a child. some books teach you about the world, about yourself, about your neighbor—but the berry pickers taught me about the power of lies. the petty lies we tell each other, the big lies we tell to protect someone else, and the lies we tell ourselves either to avoid our own realities or to bury what we don’t understand. at so many points in their lives, joe failed the people around him and norma was failed by the people around her—but what the truth brings is acceptance, forgiveness, and a path forward.