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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.

Sadeqa Johnson, author of Yellow Wife

Born on a plantation in Charles City, Virginia, Pheby Delores Brown has lived a relatively sheltered life. Shielded by her mother’s position as the estate’s medicine woman and cherished by the Master’s sister, she is set apart from the others on the plantation, belonging to neither world. She’d been promised freedom on her 18th birthday, but instead of the idyllic life she imagined with her true love, Essex Henry, Pheby is forced to leave the only home she has ever known. She unexpectedly finds herself thrust into the bowels of slavery at the infamous Devil’s Half Acre, a jail in Richmond, Virginia, where the enslaved are broken, tortured and sold every day. To survive, Pheby will have to outwit her Jailer, and soon she faces the ultimate sacrifice.

Yellow Wife by Sadeqa Johnson

February 2021

Sadeqa Johnson’s inspiration for YELLOW WIFE, her first historical novel, began a few years ago when she walked a slave trail in Richmond, Virginia, with her family and some friends. She found herself wondering what had happened as she read the marker notes and saw the site of the jail, and it sent her researching. From there came the story of Pheby Delores Brown, who was born on a plantation in Charles City, Virginia. Her life is more pampered than many of the other slaves as her father is the Master. Her yellow skin means that she has privilege. She is now 17, and the Master has promised her mother that she will be freed on her 18th birthday, but from the start you feel there is a slim chance that will happen.

Week of December 27, 2021

Paperback releases for the week of December 27th include SUNFLOWER SISTERS, the final installment in Martha Hall Kelly’s trilogy of novels about Caroline Ferriday’s family, following LILAC GIRLS and LOST ROSES; FORGOTTEN IN DEATH, J. D. Robb's 53rd In Death mystery starring homicide detective Eve Dallas, who sifts through the wreckage of the past to find a killer; PRODIGAL SON, the sixth installment in Gregg Hurwitz's Orphan X series featuring Evan Smoak, who, despite being forced into retirement, gets an urgent request for help from someone he didn't even suspect existed; Wendy Walker's DON'T LOOK FOR ME, a compelling and emotionally powerful novel about a daughter's desperate search to find her mother before it's too late; and YELLOW WIFE by Sadeqa Johnson, the harrowing story of an enslaved woman who is forced to barter love and freedom while living in the most infamous slave jail in Virginia.