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End-of-the-Year Contest 2025

Congratulations to the winners of our 2025 End-of-the-Year contest! One reader received all 42 of Carol Fitzgerald's Bookreporter.com Bets On picks from 2025, while seven others won six of these titles.

You can see all the winners below, along with 2025's Bets On selections.

If you would like to know more about these books, be sure to check out this video and podcast where Carol talks about each of her 42 picks.

Seeking Shelter: A Working Mother, Her Children, and a Story of Homelessness in America by Jeff Hobbs

March 2025

Jeff Hobbs has been on my radar since I first interviewed him 11 years ago about THE SHORT AND TRAGIC LIFE OF ROBERT PEACE, a book that I have thought about again and again. So when I saw SEEKING SHELTER, I knew I wanted to read it. For 2025, I have been looking for one book each month about a social issue to read and discuss.

With the way Jeff tells a story, I get invested in the characters and what happens in their lives. Homelessness in America, especially in large cities like Los Angeles, is a huge issue. Home instability abounds, and many live one paycheck away from losing their home. In SEEKING SHELTER, readers get to know Evelyn, a mother of five (soon to be six) who has moved to LA to chase a dream of a better education for her children. It’s 2018 when we meet her. Shortly afterwards, she leaves her abusive husband and is working full time as a waitress. But she still cannot afford housing of her own or navigate government assistance.

Jeff Hobbs, author of Seeking Shelter: A Working Mother, Her Children, and a Story of Homelessness in America

In 2018, poverty and domestic violence cast Evelyn and her children into the urban wilderness of Los Angeles, where she avoids the family crisis network that offers no clear pathway for her children to remain together and in a decent school. For the next five years, Evelyn works full time as a waitress yet remains unable to afford legitimate housing or qualify for government aid. All the while she strives to provide stability, education, loving memories and college aspirations for her children, even as they sleep in motels and in her car, living in fear of both her ex and the nation’s largest child welfare agency. Eventually Evelyn encounters Wendi Gaines, a recently trained social worker who decades earlier survived her own abusive marriage and housing crisis. Evelyn becomes one of Wendi’s first clients, and the relationship transforms them both.

Week of February 9, 2026

Paperback releases for the week of February 9th include WE ALL LIVE HERE by Jojo Moyes, a fresh, contemporary story of a woman and her unruly blended family; SEEKING SHELTER, in which Jeff Hobbs follows a single mother of six in Los Angeles who courageously struggles to keep her family together and her children in school amid the devastating housing crisis; FINLAY DONOVAN DIGS HER OWN GRAVE, the fifth installment in Elle Cosimano's fan-favorite Finlay Donovan series --- Finlay may have skeletons in her closet...but at least there's not a body in her backyard; JFK JR. by RoseMarie Terenzio and Liz McNeil, the first oral biography of John F. Kennedy Jr. and an extraordinarily intimate, comprehensive look at the real man behind the myth; and WAITING FOR THE LONG NIGHT MOON, Amanda Peters' debut collection of short fiction that describes the Indigenous experience from an astonishingly wide spectrum in time and place.

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