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JANUARY BOOK OF THE MONTH SELECTIONS

WELCOME 2021!

And welcome back to previous BOTM subscribers as well as new subscribers alike! BOTM is notoriously known for their amazing subscription gifts so if you’re new to the BOTM world then you’re in for a real treat!

Book of the Month is kicking off the new year with some fantastic selections this month, including the 2020 Book of the Year Finalists!

I chose The Survivors as my main pick and The Push as well as The City We Became as my addons.

You can also select one of the Book of the Year Finalists in this month’s box selection. Wondering who the Winner is!? The Vanishing Half is 2020 Book of the Year! If you are a BOTM BFF, you get to select one of the Finalists books for FREE.

So without further ado…. here are January’s BOTM book selections!

 



 

 


About the Book

#Bookmail: Book of the Month for January 2021

The Dating Plan

Author: Sara Desai
Pages: 352
ISBN: 0593100581
Genre: Romance
Publisher: Berkley Books
Released: March 16, 2021

Goodreads

Synopsis

Even with a step-by-step plan, these fake fiances might accidentally fall for each other in this hilarious, heartfelt romantic comedy from the author of "The Marriage Game".

Daisy Patel is a software engineer who understands lists and logic better than bosses and boyfriends. With her life all planned out, and no interest in love, the one thing she can't give her family is the marriage they expect. Left with few options, she asks her childhood crush to be her decoy fiance.

Liam Murphy is a venture capitalist with something to prove. When he learns that his inheritance is contingent on being married, he realizes his best friend's little sister has the perfect solution to his problem. A marriage of convenience will get Daisy's matchmaking relatives off her back and fulfill the terms of his late grandfather's will. If only he hadn't broken her tender teenage heart nine years ago...

Sparks fly when Daisy and Liam go on a series of dates to legitimize their fake relationship. Too late, they realize that very little is convenient about their arrangement. History and chemistry aren't about to follow the rules of this engagement.


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The Prophets

Author: Robert Jones Jr.
Pages: 320
Genre: Literary Fiction, LGBT
Publisher: Quercus
Released: January 21, 2021

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Synopsis

'Rarely is a book this finely wrought, the lives and histories it holds so tenderly felt, and rendered unforgettably true' Ocean Vuong, author of 'On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous"

Isaiah and Samuel are lovers, the barn is their home on the Halifax plantation, the place they go to be alone together away from the prying eyes of Massa Paul and the dutiful Amos. A space of radiance that contains itself and their bond, blurring all around them.

Since finding faith and credence from Paul, Amos has begun to direct suspicion towards the two men and their refusal to bend; their flickering glances, unspoken words and wilful intention. But the others know that there are many ways to hide one's self from doom and keeping tender secrets between the group is one of them.

Since the fruits of toubabs' teachings had been bitten into, the blistering sun drenched the Plantation day after day in a stark intruding light. Samuel and Isaiah are all-the-way-to-the-bone tired. When night falls, they are ready to face the darkness, emanating a fire nowhere and from each other.

In this blinding debut, Robert Jones Jr blends the lyricism of Toni Morrison with the vivid prose of Zora Neale Hurston to characterise the forceful, enduring bond of love, and what happens when brutality threatens the purest form of serenity. Love, in all of its permutations is at the heart of The Prophets.


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The Survivors

Author: Jane Harper
Pages: 384
ISBN: 1760981052
Genre: Mystery
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Released: September 22, 2020

Goodreads

Synopsis

Coming home dredges up deeply buried secrets...

Kieran Elliott's life changed forever on the day a reckless mistake led to devastating consequences.

The guilt that still haunts him resurfaces during a visit with his young family to the small coastal community he once called home.

Kieran's parents are struggling in a town where fortunes are forged by the sea. Between them all is his absent brother, Finn.

When a body is discovered on the beach, long-held secrets threaten to emerge. A sunken wreck, a missing girl, and questions that have never washed away...


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About the Book

#Bookmail: Book of the Month for January 2021

Outlawed

Author: Anna North
Pages: 272
ISBN: 1635575427
Genre: Historical Fiction, LGBT
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Released: January 5, 2021

Goodreads

Synopsis

The day of her wedding, 17 year old Ada's life looks good; she loves her husband, and she loves working as an apprentice to her mother, a respected midwife. But after a year of marriage and no pregnancy, in a town where barren women are routinely hanged as witches, her survival depends on leaving behind everything she knows.

She joins up with the notorious Hole in the Wall Gang, a band of outlaws led by a preacher-turned-robber known to all as the Kid. Charismatic, grandiose, and mercurial, the Kid is determined to create a safe haven for outcast women. But to make this dream a reality, the Gang hatches a treacherous plan that may get them all killed. And Ada must decide whether she's willing to risk her life for the possibility of a new kind of future for them all.

Featuring an irresistibly no-nonsense, courageous, and determined heroine, Outlawed dusts off the myth of the old West and reignites the glimmering promise of the frontier with an entirely new set of feminist stakes. Anna North has crafted a pulse-racing, page-turning saga about the search for hope in the wake of death, and for truth in a climate of small-mindedness and fear.


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The Removed

Author: Brandon Hobson
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0062997564
Genre: Contemporary, Fiction
Publisher: Ecco
Released: February 16, 2021

Goodreads

Synopsis

Steeped in Cherokee myths and history, a novel about a fractured family reckoning with the tragic death of their son long ago—from National Book Award finalist Brandon Hobson

In the fifteen years since their teenage son, Ray-Ray, was killed in a police shooting, the Echota family has been suspended in private grief. The mother, Maria, increasingly struggles to manage the onset of Alzheimer’s in her husband, Ernest. Their adult daughter, Sonja, leads a life of solitude, punctuated only by spells of dizzying romantic obsession. And their son, Edgar, fled home long ago, turning to drugs to mute his feelings of alienation.

With the family’s annual bonfire approaching—an occasion marking both the Cherokee National Holiday and Ray-Ray’s death, and a rare moment in which they openly talk about his memory—Maria attempts to call the family together from their physical and emotional distances once more. But as the bonfire draws near, each of them feels a strange blurring of the boundary between normal life and the spirit world. Maria and Ernest take in a foster child who seems to almost miraculously keep Ernest’s mental fog at bay. Sonja becomes dangerously fixated on a man named Vin, despite—or perhaps because of—his ties to tragedy in her lifetime and lifetimes before. And in the wake of a suicide attempt, Edgar finds himself in the mysterious Darkening Land: a place between the living and the dead, where old atrocities echo.

Drawing deeply on Cherokee folklore, The Removed seamlessly blends the real and spiritual to excavate the deep reverberations of trauma—a meditation on family, grief, home, and the power of stories on both a personal and ancestral level.


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JANUARY ADDONS

Addons are books that you can add to your monthly book selection if you also pick 1 of the Main book selections listed above. You can have a total of 3 books per book subscription box.

 


About the Book

#Bookmail: Book of the Month for January 2021

The Push

Author: Ashley Audrain
Pages: 320
ISBN: 1984881663
Genre: Thriller
Publisher: Pamela Dorman Books
Released: January 5, 2021

Goodreads

Synopsis

A tense, page-turning psychological drama about the making and breaking of a family–and a woman whose experience of motherhood is nothing at all what she hoped for–and everything she feared.

Blythe Connor is determined that she will be the warm, comforting mother to her new baby Violet that she herself never had.

But in the thick of motherhood’s exhausting early days, Blythe becomes convinced that something is wrong with her daughter–she doesn’t behave like most children do.
Or is it all in Blythe’s head? Her husband, Fox, says she’s imagining things. The more Fox dismisses her fears, the more Blythe begins to question her own sanity, and the more we begin to question what Blythe is telling us about her life as well.

Then their son Sam is born–and with him, Blythe has the blissful connection she’d always imagined with her child. Even Violet seems to love her little brother. But when life as they know it is changed in an instant, the devastating fall-out forces Blythe to face the truth.

The Push is a tour de force you will read in a sitting, an utterly immersive novel that will challenge everything you think you know about motherhood, about what we owe our children, and what it feels like when women are not believed.


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Black Buck

Author: Mateo Askaripour
Pages: 400
ISBN: 035838088X
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Released: January 5, 2021

Goodreads

Synopsis

For fans of Sorry to Bother You and The Wolf of Wall Street—a crackling, satirical debut novel about a young man given a shot at stardom as the lone Black salesman at a mysterious, cult-like, and wildly successful startup where nothing is as it seems.

There’s nothing like a Black salesman on a mission.
An unambitious twenty-two-year-old, Darren lives in a Bed-Stuy brownstone with his mother, who wants nothing more than to see him live up to his potential as the valedictorian of Bronx Science. But Darren is content working at Starbucks in the lobby of a Midtown office building, hanging out with his girlfriend, Soraya, and eating his mother’s home-cooked meals. All that changes when a chance encounter with Rhett Daniels, the silver-tongued CEO of Sumwun, NYC’s hottest tech startup, results in an exclusive invitation for Darren to join an elite sales team on the thirty-sixth floor.

After enduring a “hell week” of training, Darren, the only Black person in the company, reimagines himself as “Buck,” a ruthless salesman unrecognizable to his friends and family. But when things turn tragic at home and Buck feels he’s hit rock bottom, he begins to hatch a plan to help young people of color infiltrate America’s sales force, setting off a chain of events that forever changes the game.

Black Buck is a hilarious, razor-sharp skewering of America’s workforce; it is a propulsive, crackling debut that explores ambition and race, and makes way for a necessary new vision of the American dream.


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The Heiress Gets a Duke

Author: Harper St. George
Series: The Gilded Age Heiresses #1
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0593197208
Genre: Historical Fiction, Romance
Publisher: Berkley Books
Released: January 26, 2021

Goodreads

Synopsis

Even a fortune forged in railroads and steel can't buy entrance into the upper echelons of Victorian high society--for that you need a marriage of convenience.

American heiress August Crenshaw has aspirations. But unlike her peers, it isn't some stuffy British Lord she wants wrapped around her finger--it's Crenshaw Iron Works, the family business. When it's clear that August's outrageously progressive ways render her unsuitable for a respectable match, her parents offer up her younger sister to the highest entitled bidder instead. This simply will not do. August refuses to leave her sister to the mercy of a loveless marriage.

Evan Sterling, the Duke of Rothschild, has no intention of walking away from the marriage. He's recently inherited the title only to find his coffers empty, and with countless lives depending on him, he can't walk away from the fortune a Crenshaw heiress would bring him. But after meeting her fiery sister, he realizes Violet isn't the heiress he wants. He wants August, and he always gets what he wants.

But August won't go peacefully to her fate. She decides to show Rothschild that she's no typical London wallflower. Little does she realize that every stunt she pulls to make him call off the wedding only makes him like her even more.


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Aftershocks

Author: Nadia Owusu
Pages: 320
ISBN: 1982111240
Genre: Nonfiction, Memoir
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Released: March 5, 2020

Goodreads

Synopsis

This poetic, genre-bending work—blending memoir with cultural history—from Whiting Award winner Nadia Owusu grapples with the fault lines of identity, the meaning of home, black womanhood, and the ripple effects, both personal and generational, of emotional trauma.

Nadia Owusu grew up all over the world—from Rome and London to Dar-es-Salaam and Kampala. When her mother abandoned her when she was two years old, the rejection caused Nadia to be confused about her identity. Even after her father died when she was thirteen and she was raised by her stepmother, she was unable to come to terms with who she was since she still felt motherless and alone.

When Nadia went to university in America when she was eighteen she still felt as if she had so many competing personas that she couldn’t keep track of them all without cracking under the pressure of trying to hold herself together. A powerful coming-of-age story that explores timely and universal themes of identity, Aftershocks follows Nadia’s life as she hauls herself out of the wreckage and begins to understand that the only ground firm enough to count on is the one she writes into existence.


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The City We Became

Author: N.K. Jemisin
Series: Great Cities #1
Pages: 437
ISBN: 0316509841
Genre: Fantasy
Publisher: Orbit
Released: March 24, 2020

Goodreads

Synopsis

In Manhattan, a young grad student gets off the train and realizes he doesn't remember who he is, where he's from, or even his own name. But he can sense the beating heart of the city, see its history, and feel its power.

In the Bronx, a Lenape gallery director discovers strange graffiti scattered throughout the city, so beautiful and powerful it's as if the paint is literally calling to her.

In Brooklyn, a politician and mother finds she can hear the songs of her city, pulsing to the beat of her Louboutin heels.
And they're not the only ones.

Every great city has a soul. Some are ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York? She's got six.


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BOOK OF THE YEAR WINNER

 


About the Book

#Bookmail: Book of the Month for January 2021

The Vanishing Half

Author: Brit Bennett
Pages: 343
ISBN: 0525536299
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Released: July 2, 2020

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Synopsis

Twins, inseparable as children, ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds: one black and one white.

The Vignes sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything, including their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. Across the country, the other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, although separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen when their own daughters' story lines intersect?

Weaving together multiple strands and generations, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, The Vanishing Half is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of of race, gender, and identity, and the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person's desires and expectations.


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BOOK OF THE YEAR FINALISTS

 


About the Book

#Bookmail: Book of the Month for January 2021

The Guest List

Author: Lucy Foley
Pages: 313
ISBN: 0062868934
Publisher: William Morrow
Released: July 20, 2020

Goodreads

Synopsis

It's the wedding of the year. But someone won't survive it.

On a remote island off the coast of Ireland, guests gather to celebrate the wedding of Jules Keegan and Will Slater. Will is a rising television star, handsome and charming. Jules is a smart, ambitious magazine publisher. Though the sea is a little choppy and the cell service spotty, their wedding is everything you'd expect of a young power couple: designer dress, four-tiered cake, boutique whiskey, vintage champagne. Every detail has been curated to perfection. All that's left to orchestrate is the happiness.

But perfection is for plans, and people are all too human. It's not long after the cake is cut and the champagne popped that resentments and petty jealousies come out. Worse yet, the latest barometer reading shows the weather has shifted from FAIR to CHANGEABLE, and dark clouds are looming overhead.
Everyone on the island has a secret. Everyone has a motive. And someone won't leave this wedding alive...


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The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

Author: V.E. Schwab
Pages: 442
ISBN: 0765387565
Publisher: Tor Books
Released: October 6, 2020

Goodreads

Synopsis

A Life No One Will Remember. A Story You Will Never Forget.

France, 1714: in a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets.

Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world.

But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name.


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#Bookmail: Book of the Month for January 2021

The Girl with the Louding Voice

Author: Abi Daré
ISBN: 1524746029
Released: February 4, 2020

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Synopsis

A powerful, emotional debut novel told in the unforgettable voice of a young Nigerian woman who is trapped in a life of servitude but determined to fight for her dreams and choose her own future.

Adunni is a fourteen-year-old Nigerian girl who knows what she wants: an education. This, her mother has told her, is the only way to get a “louding voice”—the ability to speak for herself and decide her own future. But instead, Adunni's father sells her to be the third wife of a local man who is eager for her to bear him a son and heir.
When Adunni runs away to the city, hoping to make a better life, she finds that the only other option before her is servitude to a wealthy family. As a yielding daughter, a subservient wife, and a powerless slave, Adunni is told, by words and deeds, that she is nothing.

But while misfortunes might muffle her voice for a time, they cannot mute it. And when she realizes that she must stand up not only for herself, but for other girls, for the ones who came before her and were lost, and for the next girls, who will inevitably follow; she finds the resolve to speak, however she can—in a whisper, in song, in broken English—until she is heard.


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#Bookmail: Book of the Month for January 2021

Anxious People

Author: Fredrik Backman, Neil Smith
Pages: 341
ISBN: 1501160834
Publisher: Atria Books
Released: September 8, 2020

Goodreads

Synopsis

A poignant, charming novel about a crime that never took place, a would-be bank robber who disappears into thin air, and eight extremely anxious strangers who find they have more in common than they ever imagined

Looking at real estate isn't usually a life-or-death situation, but an apartment open house becomes just that when a failed bank robber bursts in and takes a group of strangers hostage. The captives include a recently retired couple who relentlessly hunt down fixer-uppers to avoid the painful truth that they can't fix up their own marriage. There's a wealthy banker who has been too busy making money to care about anyone else and a young couple who are about to have their first child but can't seem to agree on anything, from where they want to live to how they met in the first place. Add to the mix an eighty-seven-year-old woman who has lived long enough not to be afraid of someone waving a gun in her face, a flustered but still-ready-to-make-a-deal real estate agent, and a mystery man who has locked himself in the apartment's only bathroom, and you've got the worst group of hostages in the world.

Each of them carries a lifetime of grievances, hurts, secrets, and passions that are ready to boil over. None of them is entirely who they appear to be. And all of them—the bank robber included—desperately crave some sort of rescue. As the authorities and the media surround the premises, these reluctant allies will reveal surprising truths about themselves and set in a motion a chain of events so unexpected that even they can hardly explain what happens next.

Humorous, compassionate, and wise, Anxious People is an ingeniously constructed story about the enduring power of friendship, forgiveness, and hope—the things that save us, even in the most anxious of times.


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