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End-of-the-Year Contest 2022

Congratulations to the winners of our 2022 End-of-the-Year Contest! One Grand Prize winner received all 40 of Carol Fitzgerald's Bookreporter.com Bets On picks from 2022, while eight others won a selection of five of these titles. You can see all the winners below, along with 2022's Bets On books.

Tom Perrotta, author of Tracy Flick Can't Win

Tracy Flick is a hardworking assistant principal at a public high school in suburban New Jersey. Still ambitious but feeling a little stuck in midlife, she gets a jolt of good news when the longtime principal abruptly announces his retirement, creating a rare opportunity for Tracy to ascend to the top job. Tracy throws herself into her work with renewed zeal, determined to prove her worth while also managing her personal life --- a 10-year-old daughter, a needy doctor boyfriend and a burgeoning meditation practice. But nothing ever comes easily to Tracy Flick, no matter how diligent or qualified she happens to be. As she broods on the past, Tracy becomes aware of storm clouds brewing in the present.

Tracy Flick Can't Win by Tom Perrotta

June 2022

There are times when I get a sneak peek at a book long before it comes out. That is what happened with Tom Perrotta’s TRACY FLICK CAN’T WIN, which I read last October. I completely disappeared into it on a warm Saturday afternoon on the deck.

Here, Tracy Flick is in line to become the new public school principal in a small town in New Jersey when the reigning principal, Jack Weede, announces his retirement to explore the country with his wife in a Winnebago. For a few moments, it looks like Tracy has it all nailed, and then… Well, Perrotta flips the story around again and again…and again. There were many laugh-out-loud moments, but more than that, I was in awe of his storytelling, which is both comic and so truthful. He shifted the story from chapter to chapter, which ramped up the pace and the action, and I just kept reading. He made me question the town’s heroes, as well as those with all the power. But in the end, it does feel like everyone got their due. Still, it was quite a rocky and brilliantly circuitous road to getting that done. It was crowned my first Bets On selection of 2022 way back then.

Week of June 12, 2023

Paperback releases for the week of June 12th include THE MAZE, Nelson DeMille's long-awaited new thriller featuring former NYPD homicide detective John Corey, who is called out of retirement to investigate a string of grisly murders much too close to home; TRACY FLICK CAN'T WIN by Tom Perrotta, a sharp, darkly comic and pitch-perfect chronicle of the second act of one of the most memorable characters of our time; Mohsin Hamid's THE LAST WHITE MAN, a story of love, loss and rediscovery in a time of unsettling change; GHOST LOVER, an electrifying collection of nine fearless and ferocious short stories from Lisa Taddeo, who brings to life the fever of obsession, the blindness of love and the mania of grief; and SWITCHBOARD SOLDIERS by Jennifer Chiaverini, a bold, revelatory novel about one of the great untold stories of World War I --- the women of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, who broke down gender barriers in the military, smashed the workplace glass ceiling, and battled a pandemic as they helped lead the Allies to victory.

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