PageHabit mystery box: Unboxing #book subscription box #mypagehabit

So I’ve been doing a lot of research about subscription boxes and I found one that promised to give me everything I wanted. You see the books inside a book box are still most important for me and not the swag, although a bookmark or a pen or something is always nice. PageHabit has subscription boxes in multiple genres, including Mystery (thrillers fall under this category) and what’s so orginal about this box is that the book has annotations, little post-it notes with remarks from the author on some of the pages.

You also give a donation towards child’s literacy and November’s donation has gone to Liberia. “For the month of November, 2017, PageHabit has chosen to work alongside Books for Africa and the Saclepea-Mah Development Association (SAMDA) to donate books to Liberia.

Now I still wasn’t sure, I mean I created an account but was still hesitant to order because of the shipping fee but then I received an e-mail in my inbox with a limited 48h offer that I just couldn’t refuse. The offer included an extra hardback in the box and free shipping. Magic words and nothing to stop me now I thought, so I placed an order but then I saw I didn’t have the free shipping but only a 5 dollar discount. I still ordered because I didn’t want to miss out on the offer and sent an e-mail after but I only got back that I should use the hello.pagehabit e-mail address instead of the support e-mail. Yep, as if they can’t forward it themselves. The thing that bothered me most though was that they couldn’t give me an answer but were able to tell me that they gave me a 5 dollar discount for all future boxes and they reinstated my subscription to an automatic monthly subscription (which I had turned off before of course). I got into a slight panic because that was never my purpose and I’ve never been as quick to stop that again. I didn’t pursue the refund anymore, but just so you know, the free shipping is not free if you live outside the US ;-). I didn’t know if the extra book would be included or not either so that was still going to be a surprise.

I had to wait about a month for my parcel to arrive but I didn’t mind at all.. I even left it another 2-3 weeks to open it because I wanted to open it on Christmas Eve. Now I think we’ve waited long enough, here’s what was inside:

The first thing I saw was the ‘letter from the author’ (she sounds like such a sweetie!) and the book swag. The goodies were:

• a cute little book box that you can store among your other books and that can hold some of your valuables.

 

• a magnetic magnifiar bookmark
• a PINK bookmark with a quote from Diane Duane with a quote we can all agree on:

Reading one book is like eating one potato chip.

• a short story called The Cross-Eyed Bear by John Dufresne

 

• a sturdy canvas tote bag to stash my books in and which has one clear message: there’s only one road and it leads to the PageHabit library!

And then… for the best part.. the book.. or I should say books because yes there were two! There was a free hardback included as well!

 

The book inclosed in the month’s subscription box was Little Broken Things by Nicole Baart. I already read a great review of it on Janel’s blog Keeper of Pages and you can read it here. It really sounds like a wonderful book and I’m very happy with it!

I’m really looking forward to reading the annotations from the author while I read the book. So original and so cool! I only read the first one yet and it says she had another title in mind but it didn’t test well with the beta readers.

The second book included is debut novel Infinite Ground by Martin MacInnes. He’s the winner of the Somerset Maugham Award.

I know I should just judge books like that but the reviews I read all talk about surrealism, magical realism, a fevered dream and even Ian Rankin calls it strange on the cover… I don’t think this is really something for me and I don’t know if I’ll read it.

Overall I’m quite happy with this box. I can’t order it again due to the shipping as usual but if you live in the US this is a really great subscription box and they do good deeds. Also, if you share your unboxing and use the hashtag #mypagehabit PageHabit will donate an additional book to a child in need!

In case you’re interested what was in the other boxes of the month, here’s the list:

Romance – Sweet Tea and Sympathy by Molly Harper
Young Adult Fiction – Haven by Mary Lindsey
Literary Fiction – Radio Free Vermont by Bil McKibben
Fantasy – The City of Brass by S. A. Chakraborty
Horror – Blackbird by Michael Fiegel
Historical Fiction – Deadly Cure by Lawrence Goldstone

I wouldn’t have minded the Romance box either :-).

So what do you think of this box? Would you be happy with the book and the book swag? Do you know any other great subscription boxes that I should try out? I had my eye on some other boxes too but they don’t ship to Europe 😦 so any other recs are welcome!