A good book and a hot cup of tea is a proposition that sounds really good to me almost any time! Muse Monthly is a subscription service that delivers just that - a book and hot tea pairing!
My Subscription Addiction paid for this box. (Check out our review process post to learn more about how we review boxes.)
The Subscription Box: Muse Monthly
The Cost: $21 + $8.32 shipping = $29.32 per month
COUPON: Save 10% off your first box with code MSA00
The Products: One book and one hot tea to go with it
Ships to: US and Canada
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Ajiri Kenyan Black Tea With Mango - Value $9
This tea is absolutely delicious! It's very earthy and full-bodied, and the hint of mango essence makes for a wonderful drinking experience.
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (Hardcover) - Value $16.17 on Amazon (retail price: $26.95)
I just barely started reading this, but I can't wait to get into it. It sounds amazing and important! It also got great reviews on Goodreads and on Amazon. From Amazon:
A novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power that traces three hundred years in Ghana and along the way also becomes a truly great American novel. Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable sorrow, its soaring beauty, and for its monumental portrait of the forces that shape families and nations, Homegoing heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.
Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle's dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast's booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effiaís descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.
Generation after generation, Yaa Gyasi's magisterial first novel sets the fate of the individual against the obliterating movements of time, delivering unforgettable characters whose lives were shaped by historical forces beyond their control. Homegoing is a tremendous reading experience, not to be missed, by an astonishingly gifted young writer.
Verdict: I am consistently impressed with Muse Monthly's book selection, and their tea pairings are also great! I would have preferred it if they had been able to find a tea from Ghana to match the book, but this tea is quite nice anyway. The value of this box is about $25, which is on par generally with book boxes; they tend to fall a little short in terms of value. Muse Monthly generally meets or slightly exceeds value, so this box was a little low for them. Value aside, I think this is a fabulous reading experience box for any true bibliophile!
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