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End-of-the-Year Contest 2019

Congratulations to the winners of our 2019 End-of-the-Year Contest! One Grand Prize winner received all 52 of Carol Fitzgerald's Bookreporter.com Bets On picks from 2019, while 13 others won a selection of four of these titles. You can see all the winners below, along with 2019's Bets On books.

Winter Reading 2019

At Bookreporter.com, we kicked off 2019 with our fifth annual Winter Reading Contests and Feature. We hosted a series of 24-hour contests spotlighting a book releasing this winter (or a book publishing in the spring that we wanted to get on your radar now) and gave five lucky readers a chance to win it.

Even though our contests have wrapped up, we encourage you to take a look at this year's featured titles, as these are the books you'll want to read during the winter months --- and into the warmer ones!

Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive by Stephanie Land

At 28, Stephanie Land’s plans of breaking free from the roots of her hometown in the Pacific Northwest to chase her dreams of attending a university and becoming a writer were cut short when a summer fling turned into an unexpected pregnancy. She turned to housekeeping to make ends meet.

With a tenacious grip on her dream to provide her daughter the very best life possible, Stephanie worked days and took classes online to earn a college degree, and began to write relentlessly. She wrote the true stories that weren’t being told: the stories of overworked and underpaid Americans. Of living on food stamps and WIC (Women, Infants and Children) coupons to eat. Of the government programs that provided her housing, but that doubled as halfway houses. The aloof government employees who called her lucky for receiving assistance while she didn’t feel lucky at all. She wrote to remember the fight, to eventually cut through the deep-rooted stigmas of the working poor.

Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive by Stephanie Land

January 2019

I read MAID back in the spring as I was interviewing Stephanie Land for both the Book Expo Buzz panel and Facebook Live. Her book stuck with me as it’s a memoir full of both brutal honesty and lots of heart about the stress and anxiety of being a single mom, trying to make her way through the day while circling the edges of poverty. She lived in a really fragile world where paycheck to paycheck defines her existence, and it’s indeed a slippery slope.

Week of January 20, 2020

Paperback releases for the week of January 20th include ONE GOOD DEED, a fast-paced historical thriller from David Baldacci, who introduces readers to Aloysius Archer, a WWII veteran forced to investigate a small-town murder --- or risk returning to prison; MAID, Stephanie Land's memoir about working as a maid, a beautiful and gritty exploration of poverty in America; OUTSIDE LOOKING IN, a provocative novel from T.C. Boyle that explores the first scientific and recreational forays into LSD and its mind-altering possibilities; CAMELOT'S END by Jon Ward, the captivating story of Ted Kennedy's 1980 campaign for president against the incumbent Jimmy Carter, told in full for the first time; and Joe Ide's WRECKED, in which the case of a young artist's missing mother sets Isaiah Quintabe (IQ for short) on a collision course with his own Moriarty.

October 2021

October's Books on Screen roundup includes the series premieres of "Maid" on Netflix, "Dopesick" on Hulu and "I Know What You Did Last Summer" on Amazon Prime Video; the season three release of "You" on Netflix; the films Dune, Fever Dream and There’s Someone Inside Your House; the continuation of "Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol," "The Morning Show" and "American Rust"; and the DVD releases of The Suicide Squad, Naked Singularity and Old.