Features

End-of-the-Year Contest 2021

Congratulations to the winners of our 2021 End-of-the-Year Contest! One Grand Prize winner received all 44 of Carol Fitzgerald's Bookreporter.com Bets On picks from 2021, while 11 others won a selection of four of these titles. You can see all the winners below, along with 2021's Bets On books.

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The Children's Blizzard by Melanie Benjamin

January 2021

THE CHILDREN’S BLIZZARD is Melanie Benjamin’s seventh book, and I think it is her strongest thus far. It’s historical fiction set on the Great Plains against the backdrop of a major event on January 12, 1888. On that day, the temperatures on the Great Plains were unseasonably warm --- and, as a result, people went off to their chores and children headed to school less warmly dressed than usual. As a wickedly ferocious snowstorm swooped in, among those challenged by the weather were teachers in one-room schoolhouses across the Plains, many of them teenagers, who were faced with a dilemma: Do they send the children home, or do they keep them in the schoolhouse? If they chose the latter, there was not enough wood or building insulation to keep them warm, but the raging storm they would send the children out into was also an issue to consider.

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Melanie Benjamin, author of The Children's Blizzard

The morning of January 12, 1888, was unusually mild, following a punishing cold spell. It was warm enough for the homesteaders of the Dakota Territory to venture out again, and for their children to return to school without their heavy coats --- leaving them unprepared when disaster struck. At the hour when most prairie schools were letting out for the day, a terrifying, fast-moving blizzard blew in without warning. Schoolteachers as young as 16 were suddenly faced with life and death decisions: Keep the children inside, to risk freezing to death when fuel ran out, or send them home, praying they wouldn’t get lost in the storm.

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Week of January 10, 2022

Paperback releases for the week of January 10th include THE CHILDREN’S BLIZZARD by Melanie Benjamin, a story of courage on the prairie, inspired by the devastating storm that struck the Great Plains in 1888, threatening the lives of hundreds of immigrant homesteaders, especially schoolchildren; THE SURVIVORS, a thrilling mystery from Jane Harper in which coming home dredges up deeply buried secrets for Kieran Elliott, whose life changed forever on the day a reckless mistake led to devastating consequences; A FATAL LIE, the 23rd installment in Charles Todd's series starring Scotland Yard Inspector Ian Rutledge, who must delve deep into a dead man’s life and his past to find a killer determined to keep dark secrets buried; and THREE-MARTINI AFTERNOONS AT THE RITZ, Gail Crowther's vividly rendered and empathetic exploration of how two of the greatest poets of the 20th century --- Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton --- became bitter rivals and, eventually, friends.

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