Reader’s Choice: The Berry Pickers
November 24, 2025 @ 6:30 pm - 7:30 pm
Reader’s Choice: Morgan Witham
The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters
MILS catalog record
“July 1962. Following in the tradition of Indigenous workers from Nova Scotia, a Mi’kmaq family arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family’s youngest child, vanishes. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at the edge of a berry field. In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. As she grows older, Norma slowly comes to realize there is something her parents aren’t telling her. Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she will spend decades trying to uncover this family secret.” – From publisher website
About Morgan
Hometown: Little Deer Isle, Maine.
Current residence and connection to the island: While I am a direct descendant of Jonathan Torrey, one of the island’s first settlers, my branch of the family migrated to Winter Harbor in the 1800s, didn’t move back to the island until I was the ripe old age of 18 months in 1981—when my uncle was hired to teach art at DI-S High School. So I grew up here, and attended the schools, though eventually transferred to the Maine School of Science and Mathematics after my sophomore year. My family moved off island in ‘05, and I never expected to return to live here. Plot twist: I got a job on Isle au Haut and spent almost five years there, which was my back door into returning to the Deer Isle-Stonington community. I bought my house in 2012, and have been living here year-round ever since, primarily working in the schools.
Why do you read? In my late 20s I moved from being a fiction addict to a non-fiction glutton. I am a sucker for biography, memoir, health/well being, Eastern European history, the history of science, religion, philosophy, sexuality, math, the social sciences, American history…I love learning how people have spent their lives as a means of figuring out how to invest mine. For escapism I read murder mysteries/police procedurals…usually British.
What genre do you hate to read? Anything having to do with organized crime, unless it happened to be a part of a political regime (in which case it becomes a genre I am more likely to read about than not).
Last book you LOVED: The Sandman audiobook series by Neil Gaiman.
Currently reading: The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times by Wolfram Eilenberger.
Why did you choose The Berry Pickers? Because I needed to pick fiction [for the book club prompt] I surveyed family and friends, and this was on the recommendation of my mother—she’s a pretty clever person, and I always want more windows into understanding the dynamics of this region we call home.