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THE BERRY PICKERS

One of our recommended books is The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters

A four-year-old Mi’kmaq girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a mystery that will haunt the survivors, unravel a family, and remain unsolved for nearly fifty years.

July 1962. A Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia 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. Joe will remain distraught by his sister’s disappearance for years to come.

In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family.

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KINDERLAND

One of our recommended books is Kinderland by Liliana Corobca and Monica Cure

From the author of the award-winning The Censor’s Notebook, a novel about children whose parents have departed for employment in foreign lands, told through the perspective of a young girl who is responsible for her two brothers.

With her parents gone in search of work, twelve-year-old Cristina must act as a mother to her two younger brothers. Through her eyes, we experience the feeling of wonderment and loneliness as they roam the streets of a contemporary Moldovan village. Her mother has gone to Italy, her father to Siberia, and the children grow up fast, imitating the gestures of the absent adults,

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THE DEATH OF A JAYBIRD

One of our recommended books is The Death of a Jaybird by Jodi M. Savage

Reminiscent of The Year of Magical Thinking and Somebody’s Daughter, a deeply empathetic and often humorous collection of essays that explore the author’s ever-changing relationships with her grandmother and mother, through sickness and health, as they experience the joys and challenges of Black American womanhood.

Jodi M. Savage was raised in Brooklyn, New York, by her maternal grandmother. Her whip-smart, charismatic mother struggled with addiction and was unable to care for her. Granny—a fiery Pentecostal preacher who had a way with words—was Jodi’s rock, until Alzheimer’s disease turned the tables, and a 28-year-old Jodi stepped into the role of caretaker.

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A SONG OVER MISKWAA RAPIDS

One of our recommended books is A Song Over Miskwaa Rapids by Linda Legarde Grover

When a rock is dislodged from its slope by mischievous ancestors, the past rises to meet the present, and Half-Dime Hill gives up a gruesome secret it has kept for half a century. Some people of Mozhay Point have theories about what happened; others know—and the discovery stirs memories long buried, reviving a terrible story yet to be told.

Returning to the fictional Ojibwe reservation in northern Minnesota she has so deftly mapped in her award-winning books, Linda LeGarde Grover reveals traumas old and new as Margie Robineau, in the midst of a fight to keep her family’s long-held allotment land,

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THE PORCELAIN MAKER

One of our recommended books is The Porcelain Maker by Sarah Freethy

An epic story of love, betrayal, and art that spans decades, through the horrors of World War II to 21st century America, inspired by an actual porcelain factory in Dachau.

Two lovers caught at the crossroads of history.

A daughter’s search for the truth.

Germany, 1929. At a festive gathering of young bohemians in Weimar, two young artists, Max, a skilled Jewish architect, and Bettina, a celebrated avant-garde painter, are drawn to each other and begin a whirlwind romance. Their respective talents transport them to the dazzling lights of Berlin, but this bright beginning is quickly dimmed by the rising threat of Nazism.

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ABSOLUTION

One of our recommended books is Absolution by Alice McDermott

A riveting account of women’s lives on the margins of the Vietnam War, from the renowned winner of the National Book Award.

You have no idea what it was like. For us. The women, I mean. The wives.

American women–American wives–have been mostly minor characters in the literature of the Vietnam War, but in Absolution they take center stage. Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney on loan to navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a beauty and a bully. In Saigon in 1963,

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