Lenore is running a contest to win free books… and makeup. Not to mention an interesting interview on how the cover of THE STOLEN ONE (the book prompting the contest, which I have not read) came about.
What are y’all’s favorite covers? TWILIGHT is an all-time favorite of mine — I picked it up, before I’d heard any of the hype, because of the alluring apple image. Sometimes choosing books that way doesn’t work out; THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS had a cover that grabbed me (mostly for its fairy-tale imagery, which suits the book), but the story was a bit meh. It set up a kind of cool fairy tale world, but there weren’t enough surprises (the evil characters stayed evil and you knew who they were from the get-go, etc), which made it feel moralistic, in the sense that it reduced the story to its moral, which as I recall was something about not being selfish, or something. I suppose that’s a bit true to fairy tale conventions, but I like my fairy tales, these days, with a twist.
I’ve already talked about how much I love IRAQIGIRL’s cover. We originally had a very different design, but I prefer the one we ended up with. (It helps that I like pink!)
(Click the picture to see IraqiGirl’s cover in larger size.)
-->Feed me text
September 8, 2009 at 4:38 pm
I’ve heard a lot of good things about The Book of Lost Things, but haven’t gotten a chance to pick up a copy yet. Sorry to hear that it was not that great. I may have to revise my opinion on reading it.
September 8, 2009 at 4:53 pm
Well, I hate to discourage anyone from reading anything… but it wasn’t my cup of tea. I liked it at the beginning, I just kept expecting it to go someplace more inventive than it did.
Now that I think about it, I think part of the problem is that I never got much feel for the child narrator. It was written with a fair amount of distance — I’m having trouble articulating this, but it felt like the way adult-book authors write child characters instead of the way children’s book authors do… which is fine, except when the child is your protagonist and you need to identify with him on some level, not just feel concern for him.
Actually, I’d be interested to see the positive commentary you read. I love reading different takes on books I’ve read… and I could be convinced, I think, that there’s something cool lurking in THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS that I missed.
September 9, 2009 at 3:38 pm
I liked Book of Lost Things, but I didn’t love it. I thought a lot of it was inventive, but yeah, I could have used some more twists – well put!