Author: MJ Fletcher
Publisher: Draft2Digital
Rating: WARTY!
This is another classic example of a book cover design fail. The title is right there: the DOORKNOB Society, yet what takes center stage? Yep - the keys! Sometimes you have to wonder. Other times you have to really wonder....
This is obviously a rip-off of Harry Potter, and I know a lot of novels are these days, but usually they’re not quite so baldly derivative. When I was a kid, there was this phrase people used to indicate snobbery or something a cut above the rest, or somehow better than usual. It was rather in the mode of “dressed up like a dog’s dinner” but this merely involved adding “with knobs on” to some statement – like a drawer isn’t really useful or complete until it has the knobs fitted (kitchen storage designers I’m looking at you). I couldn’t help but think about that as I read Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Knobs, er, The Doorknob Society.
Sure, the author had done a reversal – making Harry into a girl (as Rowling had evidently considered, at one point, but in her case she stayed with the original gender), but she still goes to a special ed. School, and there are still four houses and on and on. Boring. That wasn’t even the worst part of this for me. The worst part was the appallingly clichéd “love” interest, in the form of a studly, muscled guy with a chiseled jaw – that’s what he was described as (the chiseled, not the studly!). It’s pathetic. Can authors not think for themselves and come up with something different?
It was at that point, right after that specific description, that I quit reading this. The novel had not been that great to begin with (and sentences like “I’m a legacy my parents went there.” didn't help, but that was the final straw for me. If a novel can't make a reasonable effort at getting away from the herd, or at the very least, at some originality, then why should I offer a reasonable attempt at reading it? Life is too short.
