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End-of-the-Year Contest 2020

Congratulations to the winners of our 2020 End-of-the-Year Contest! One Grand Prize winner received all 42 of Carol Fitzgerald's Bookreporter.com Bets On picks from 2020, while 14 others won a selection of three of these titles. You can see all the winners below, along with 2020's Bets On books.

Robert Kolker, author of Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their 12 children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins --- aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony --- and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the 10 Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family? What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health.

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker

April 2020

Last fall, I heard Robert Kolker talk about HIDDEN VALLEY ROAD: Inside the Mind of an American Family, and I was completely caught up in its subject. This is the story of the Galvin family from Colorado Springs, Colorado. They have 12 children, 10 of them boys, and six of those boys have schizophrenia. I love narrative nonfiction when it is in the hands of a great storyteller, which is exactly what we have here. Kolker is skilled at giving us the opportunity to know not only the family, but also the science behind this mental illness.

Week of March 1, 2021

Paperback releases for the week of March 1st include BECOMING, the deeply personal memoir by the former First Lady of the United States, featuring a new introduction by Michelle Obama, a letter from the author to her younger self, and a book club guide with 20 discussion questions and a five-question Q&A; HIDDEN VALLEY ROAD, Robert Kolker's fascinating account of a midcentury American family with 12 children, six of whom were diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease; Therese Anne Fowler's A GOOD NEIGHBORHOOD, which asks big questions about life in America today as it explores the effects of class, race and heartrending love in a story that’s as provocative as it is powerful; and IN FIVE YEARS by Rebecca Serle, a striking and moving love story following an ambitious lawyer who experiences an astonishing vision that could change her life forever.