Subscription Box Review: Book of the Month Club – October 2016

Here I am again, back with another bookish subscription box review for you. This time I will be focusing on my first box from Book of the Month Club. Book of the Month Club is a subscription service that has been around since 1926!

Each month on the 1st, BOTM’s 4 judges and 1 surprise guest judge each nominate their book choice for the month. Then, you have until the 6th of the month to choose which book you wish to be the one sent to you, or you can also skip that month if none of the options appeal to you! How great is it that you get to decide which book is sent to you?!  You also have the option to choose books from past months choices, as well as a special list of some of the judges favorite books from any genre. The monthly selections are typically literary fiction, so just be aware of that if that is a genre that doesn’t particularly interest you.

Subscriptions start at $14.99 per month, and you can also add up to 2 extra books to your box for $9.99 each. All books are hardback and have the BOTM logo on them as well. Each box comes with a letter from the judge explaining why they chose that book, a BOTM bookmark, and a little bitty gift as well.

If you are interested in subscribing to the BOTM Club, just click on the link HERE.

My October Box

1. BOTM reading mints
2. BOTM bookmark
3. The Wonder by Emma Donoghue – my September BOTM choice
4. The Girls by Emma Cline – add on
5. A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles – add on

In the latest masterpiece by Emma Donoghue, bestselling author of Room, an English nurse brought to a small Irish village to observe what appears to be a miracle-a girl said to have survived without food for months-soon finds herself fighting to save the child’s life.

Tourists flock to the cabin of eleven-year-old Anna O’Donnell, who believes herself to be living off manna from heaven, and a journalist is sent to cover the sensation. Lib Wright, a veteran of Florence Nightingale’s Crimean campaign, is hired to keep watch over the girl.

Written with all the propulsive tension that made Room a huge bestseller, THE WONDER works beautifully on many levels–a tale of two strangers who transform each other’s lives, a powerful psychological thriller, and a story of love pitted against evil.

Northern California, during the violent end of the 1960s. At the start of summer, a lonely and thoughtful teenager, Evie Boyd, sees a group of girls in the park, and is immediately caught by their freedom, their careless dress, their dangerous aura of abandon. Soon, Evie is in thrall to Suzanne, a mesmerizing older girl, and is drawn into the circle of a soon-to-be infamous cult and the man who is its charismatic leader. Hidden in the hills, their sprawling ranch is eerie and run down, but to Evie, it is exotic, thrilling, charged—a place where she feels desperate to be accepted. As she spends more time away from her mother and the rhythms of her daily life, and as her obsession with Suzanne intensifies, Evie does not realize she is coming closer and closer to unthinkable violence, and to that moment in a girl’s life when everything can go horribly wrong.

With his breakout debut novel, Rules of Civility, Amor Towles established himself as a master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction, bringing late 1930s Manhattan to life with splendid atmosphere and a flawless command of style.

A Gentleman in Moscow immerses us in another elegantly drawn era with the story of Count Alexander Rostov. When, in 1922, he is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the count is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him a doorway into a much larger world of emotional discovery.

Brimming with humor, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates the count’s endeavor to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose.

Are you a Book of the Month Club member? If so, have you enjoyed the choices for the months that you’ve been subscribed for? Which nominees have been your favorite? Have you read any of the books that I received? What book subscription boxes do you subscribe to?