01
If you loved stolen children and hidden family truths
Before We Were Yours
Lisa Wingate
Why Matchbook recommends it: Children taken from their family by a real Tennessee orphanage scandal, and the descendant who uncovers it decades later.
What to read next
Books Like The Berry Pickers
The Berry Pickers begins in 1962 when four-year-old Ruthie, from a Mi'kmaq family picking blueberries in Maine, disappears — and follows the decades-long consequences for the brother left behind and the girl raised under another name. Readers looking for books like The Berry Pickers want quiet, emotionally powerful stories of family separation, identity and Indigenous experience, where the truth arrives slowly and the ending hurts in the best way.
Our picks
02
If you loved the long aftermath of a family torn apart
Five Little Indians
Michelle Good
Why Matchbook recommends it: Five survivors of a Canadian residential school try to build lives in the decades afterward — honest, painful and hopeful.
03
If you loved a family story in an Indigenous community
The Round House
Louise Erdrich
Why Matchbook recommends it: A boy on a North Dakota reservation seeks justice after an attack on his mother — a moving coming-of-age story.
04
If you loved Indigenous family and community resilience
Moon of the Crusted Snow
Waubgeshig Rice
Why Matchbook recommends it: A remote Anishinaabe community faces collapse when the power goes out — quiet, tense and rooted in family.
05
If you loved a girl living under another identity
The Vanishing Half
Brit Bennett
Why Matchbook recommends it: Twin sisters choose different lives — one passing as white — and the decades of consequences that follow.
06
If you loved family chosen and fought for
The Marrow Thieves
Cherie Dimaline
Why Matchbook recommends it: In a dystopian Canada, Indigenous people are hunted for their marrow, and a teen finds family on the run.
07
If you loved a brother narrating a family tragedy
Ordinary Grace
William Kent Krueger
Why Matchbook recommends it: A summer of deaths in a 1961 Minnesota town, remembered by a boy whose family is changed forever.
What did you love about The Berry Pickers?
The romance? The characters? The setting? The twists? Tell Matchbook what worked for you — and what didn't — and we'll find your next read.