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End-of-the-Year Contest 2012

We are thrilled to announce a very special contest on Bookreporter.com featuring Carol Fitzgerald’s Bookreporter.com Bets On picks from this year. One Grand Prize winner will be awarded ALL of her 28 selections for 2012, while 28 others will win a copy of one of these titles.

Vaddey Ratner, author of In the Shadow of the Banyan

For seven-year-old Raami, the shattering end of childhood begins the night her father comes home bringing details of the civil war that has overwhelmed the streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital. Over the next four years, as she endures the deaths of family members, starvation, and brutal forced labor, Raami clings to the remaining vestige of childhood --- the mythical legends and poems her father told her.

In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner

August 2012

Two copies of IN THE SHADOW OF THE BANYAN by Vaddey Ratner arrived in the office a few months ago. My son, Greg, grabbed one and read 100 pages on his train ride home and emailed me from the train to say, “This is an incredible book.” By the next day, he had finished it and was hounding me to read it so we could talk about it. When I got a few pages in, I saw why and knew that the voice of seven-year-old Raami was not going to be one I forget anytime soon. The book is set in 1975 after the Cambodian Civil War as Cambodia is overtaken by the Khmer Rouge. Raami and her family, who have a prosperous life, are ousted from their home and held in the clutches of the Khmer Rouge, who move them from camp to camp, where survival under primitive and abusive conditions become the world of her childhood. The genocide during this time kills more than two million people.

Week of June 3, 2013

Only a few years before becoming a famous actress and an icon for her generation, a 15-year-old Louise Brooks leaves Wichita to make it big in New York. Much to her annoyance, she is accompanied by a 36-year-old chaperone who is neither mother nor friend. Young Louise is known for her arrogance and her lack of respect for convention. Ultimately, the five weeks they spend together will change their lives forever in Laura Moriarty's THE CHAPERONE.