I'm a Winner!

Every Friday I enter a contest at a website called The Smoking Gun. The site calls this the "Friday Timewaster" -- something I'm always willing to do on a Friday. The contest is to match up five real mugshots with either their crime, what they shoplifted, a weapon they used in an assault (and we're not talking guns, we're talking things like curling irons and water bottles). So you're matching five things to five mugshots.

Of course, I put way too much thought into this, and I have never won. A few weeks back, I was doing the contest and saw it was just a few minutes to go -- the contest closes at 6 pm Eastern time on Friday. So I just sort of threw in the last two, believing it couldn't possibly be right, but running out of time for more thought.

So of course, that's the week I won. I got an email from the site a few days later saying that I was one of two people who got them all right. My prize was to select any book I wanted from the New York Times Best Sellers List -- fiction or non-fiction. I was actually quite pleased with that prize, and thought it's a good prize as surely there is something there for everyone.

I am not lucky. I do not win contests. I do not win door prizes. I do not win drawings. Ok, so I am lucky in some ways, but not when it comes to prizes. But today, my prize arrived, and here's what I picked:



I hadn't realized until just now she is a Pulitzer winner. Have not heard of her winning book, however.


 



And here's Amazon's description -- you know me... love those dysfunctional family stories for some odd reason:

Haunted by the freak accident that killed their father when they were children, Jim and Bob Burgess escaped from their Maine hometown of Shirley Falls for New York City as soon as they possibly could. Jim, a sleek, successful corporate lawyer, has belittled his bighearted brother their whole lives, and Bob, a Legal Aid attorney who idolizes Jim, has always taken it in stride. But their long-standing dynamic is upended when their sister, Susan—the Burgess sibling who stayed behind—urgently calls them home. Her lonely teenage son, Zach, has gotten himself into a world of trouble, and Susan desperately needs their help. And so the Burgess brothers return to the landscape of their childhood, where the long-buried tensions that have shaped and shadowed their relationship begin to surface in unexpected ways that will change them forever.