Last week I read GETTING THE GIRL, an early book by Markus Zusak *. Here’s the cover of my GETTING THE GIRL and an alternate cover of the same book:
These, obviously, are examples of the YA trend of cover cropping (HT: 100 Scope Notes). My question: WHY?
I mean, GETTING THE GIRL is actually all about a character who, unlike his brother, sees the girl-in-question’s humanity and personality rather than just her body. And yet.
Sarah Dessen has made a virtue of these covers, of which she’s very enamored. I read an interview with her where she talks about how she’s insisted to her publisher that her covers never show a girl’s face because she thinks “any girl” should be able to see the cover and feel like it’s her. Which kind of re-raises my frustration with her sense that all girls are white and thin (and, actually, blond, if they’re going to be one of her protagonists), but not my point at the moment.
My point is: I get why they use these covers; they work on me. I mean, I love these covers; they make me pick up the book:
… But they also kind of creep me out.
Meanwhile, you sometimes are invited to fetishize the girl’s face instead:
For all that I expressed puzzlement at John Green for covers featuring girls’ faces on books that seem ostensibly to be for boys, I give him huge props for using normal-pretty, instead of model-pretty, girls:
* who you might know from his book THE BOOK THIEF, which won a million awards including the National Book Award and is one of the best books I’ve read in many, many years, a Holocaust novel narrated by death and the only one I can think of that humanizes the German populace, but not the point of this post.
-->Feed me text
April 10, 2009 at 2:45 pm
I haven’t really read the books you mentioned, but that IS odd. Hmmm.
In the case of the first book (Getting the Girl) it does seem like they’re trying to lure in guys with sex (like, ooh, look, tantalizing, a navel!). Like, it’s just a body, no head, so it’s obvious what they’re trying to do.
I’m not sure about the Sarah Dessen ones. I think as you said, they are still about white/blonde girls, so it’s not like just by taking off the head, someone will say, “Oh, that’s me!”
Very interesting post!
April 10, 2009 at 3:25 pm
Also, since I have no visual sensibility: do the first and second Zusak covers (which, I believe, correspond to the US and British editions respectively) come from the same photo shoot? They couldn’t possibly have reshot just for the slightly different British cover, could they have?
April 11, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Weird. I never noticed this before. Now half of my bookshelf is taken up by either floating, disembodied heads or headless people. Ew.
January 6, 2010 at 12:21 am
[...] whether parts of the book were planned as replies to the criticisms (not made only here!) that everyone is white… in North Carolina or that mysteriously perfect boyfriends solve the girls’ problems while the girls often seem [...]
July 23, 2010 at 7:20 am
I have read this book when I was a Junior in high school. With that said I like to say it helped me in many ways. And one was to visualize the girls I had a crush on (well most of them). Creepy as that sounds it still helped in making me believe and pursue (some) of the girls. Even with my fault and negatives. So I loved the cover. And it also addresses the majority. And I would know, being a minority. I’m Native American.
March 7, 2012 at 1:41 am
[...] SimonPulse emblazoned the front cover of Deb Caletti’s THE SIX RULES OF MAYBE with an SLJ blurb comparing it to the best of Dessen, and a glance at the back shows that all of Caletti’s books have Dessen-esque covers in overall look even if they lack the emphasis on disembodied body parts. [...]