The Fourth Day of Christmas is book covers! Yuk covers! For me there are two main problems with book covers. The first and most egregious is that of featuring nude or near-naked females, or young women on the cover. They're almost exclusively young women, aren't they? Books about older women tend not the feature the main character on the cover, or if they do, the face is obscured or peculiarly absent. I can see how, though still inappropriate, a woman's body might figure largely on an erotica title, but curiously, most of those seem to feature male bodies, and none of the ones I'll list here are such novels anyway. Here are a few:
- Karma by Donna Augustine features essentially a pair of legs. The woman's face is clearly unimportant since it's entirely in shadow. Who cares about her face when you can check out a great pair of gams? The ironic thing about this is that one of the first things mentioned in the novel is the woman's face. But it's a ridiculous first person voice story with the usual pointless contents list and it's worthless as a novel.
- Zatanna's Search is a DC comic about magician Zatanna, whose legs evidently take up three fifths of her body length. Comic books are the pits when it comes to portraying women.
- The Housewife Assassin's Handbook by Josie Brown features a headless woman - by dint of the fact that her entire body is shown from painfully high heels to her shoulders, but no head is visible because it's off the top of the cover. This is reminiscent of those magazines which routinely feature a woman's face on the cover, but her mind is obscured by the magazine's title. This used to be a common practice, sending the message that the magine title is far more important than a woman's brain, since her only useful feature is her pretty face. This story was another first person voice piece of trash.
- Everblue by Brenda Pandos has a very red cover, curiously enough because you cannot, by law - the law of the sea, in fact - ever have a mermaid whose hair isn't red. The thing is the mermaid's hair color was never mentioned in the original fairy-tale and the only red in that story was the sunsets, the flowers, and the seashells. So whence the red hair? Probably Disney, when they were teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and desperately went back to their fairytale roots, and scored a hit! I don't have much time for Disney, and The Little Mermaid is one of only about three Disney animated movies that I actually like! Even then it was for the music rather than the usual dumb-ass Disney story. They only chose red hair to distinguish the Little Mermaid from Darryl Hannah's blonde mermaid who appeared in a live-action Disney movie - and apparently, inadvertently, and indirectly started a meme! This novel has one of the dumbest tables of contents ever created: it's literally a list of numbers 1 thru 60, covering three fucking screens. Seriously? The story begins on page 6 with the chapter titled 'Ash'. Chapter 2 is 'Fin' - get it ? A mermaid story featuring a guy named Fin? LOL! Fin quite literally manhandles Ash after pretty much drowning her in saliva generated by his non-stop physical wants. There's not a single word about her as a person. She's merely a female fleshbag for him to masturbate inside. It's all carnal all the way with Fin. Every chapter is back and forth like a fucking grandfather clock between these two assholes both narrating in worst person voice. What a pile of flyblown dogshit this one is!
- Bound by Kate Sparkes. Another redhead on the cover! Of course it;s a trilogy. It's YA! It's the 'Bound' trilogy! I automatically avoid any novel with the word 'bound' anywhere in the title. In this case the redhead isn't even remotely bound. Not a chain or a rope in sight. She doenslt look contrstrained in any way at all. Yet the title is 'Bound'. In fact, she appears about as unbound as one can get, standing outdoors in the wilds, in a creek, while seductively baring her cleavage. Go figure. Does that make her wet and wild? I don't care.
- Flashover by Annie Bellet. I get turned off byt he name Annie. I think it's from those long-ago CPR classes where you have to ask this dummy, modeled on an antique French drowning victim known as L'Inconnue de la Seine, if she's okay. You have to call her Annie, and of course she isn't okay: she has no legs or arms. I have to say that in general, I've liked Annie Bellet's work, including this one, but that cover sucks! Was it really necessary to picture a naked woman on the cover? Another redhead, too! It shows only her head and torso, so she's simultanoeously both topless and bottomless.
- Big Girls Do It by Jasinda Wilder. This consists solely of a woman pictured from the waist down, wearing black panties and red-violet thigh high stockings. All of this author's novels seem to feature naked male torsos on the cover except the big girl series, which is ostensibly about a 'fat girl'. That;s not my term. That term appears twice in this book and the word 'fat' appears many more times when describing the main character. The openign sentence reads, "My mom says I was always fat." I read one of these books and it actually wasn't bad, despite being first person, but the covers suck. They unnecessarily reduce the model to a vagina and a pair of legs, and the girl doesn't look remotely 'fat' to my eyes. She's not even big-bodied. At least not by my estimation. But doe sshe need to be reduced to her legs and gentialia? No! It looks like pretty much the same picture is used for every book in the series with the only change being the color of the stockings. It's not appropriate.
- Big Girls Do It Better by Cindy Larie is another offender. This series has nothing to do with Jasinda Wilder's series; it just uses the same title as one of her novels (or she uses the same title as one of Larie's!). The cover is still inappropriate - it shows a body up to the neck. Off with her head, as far as the cover is concerned, but at least it's actually a BBW in this picture. Not that that this makes the picture any better.
- Loving Maddie from A to Z by Kelly Jamieson has nothing but a pair of gray-scale legs wearing bright red shoes on its cover. Inside it has the usual useless table of contents, and while - at least - it isn't written in first person, it was boring. The author thinks she's being so daring and titivating, but there isn't a single thing she's purveying that outside of mainstream or even remotely daring.
In the other category - of weird or otherwise inappropriate covers, typically it will be where the cover has little or nothing to do with the story inside or the cover is just generally oddball such as:
- Too Clever by Half by Will North. I never heard of Will North, yet this author puts his name up top on the cover in large letters like he's universally known! Go figure. I guess some people's ego looms large, huh? He's not the only such offender. I've seen it repeatedly. so that's one sin against this cover. Above his name he has 'International Bestselling Author" which requires no more than a one time score of 5,000 copies on the New York Times Best Seller list and you can use that title forever. If you buy those five thousand copies yourself, you're made for life, apparently! Who has ever done such a thing I do not know, but it's not impossible. Right below the author's name is a quote from another author I've never heard of, Robert Dugoni. Like this is supposed to win me over! Newsflash! Doing dumb shit will never win me over! This quoted guy says, "With beautiful writing, laser-fast plot...." Stop right there. Laser fast? Laser light is light. It's coherent light of one frequency which is what makes a laser so powerful, but that light travels, like all light, at light speed. So a laser is no "faster" than the light on your phone. Or your refrigerator light. I've heard of laser-focused, but never laser-fast. That's one of the dumbest things I ever read, so this immediately tells me I never want to read anything Dugoni ever writes, and it serves only to confirm I never want to read a novel by Will North either, and all of this came from the first third of the cover! For a title that contains the word 'half', the cover is divided into fifths. The top two-fifths are the sky, the middle fifth the surface of a lake, or maybe the ocean, and the bottom two-fifths are underwater, showing what looks like an Iron Age neck rings known as a torc. But it looks huge - too large to fit your average neck! In short, for me, the cover is a disaster. Inside, the contents list shows chapters "One, Two, Three..." and so on, so you can jump to any chapter, but who even wants to? It's stupid pretension that publishers insist upon blindly because they have never actually made the mental transition to the ebook medium. A contents list is pointless and moronic in an ebook, and this list covers three pages! This is followed by acknowledgments and so on, and a dramatis personae list which is so stupid in a novel. But ti gets worse! There's a prologue! I automatically skip prologues and often the fact that there is a prologue is enough to turn me off a book because if that's the author's mentality, I don't want to read anything they've written. So we'll leave it there.
- Love is Love by Mette Bach is one I reviewed negatively about three years back. I mentioned then that the cover has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with anybody or anything in the entire novel. The main character, Emmy, is overweight, but the character pictured on the cover is a very slender androgynous person who bears no resemblance either, to the ftm transgender character in the novel. I'll bet that cover mdoel isn't trans either, which is a crying shame, notwithstanding how gorgeous they look in their androgyny. This is the problem with the cover, Some asshole cover designer slapped that on there without a single thought in their head as to whether it bore any relationship whatsoever to the story between those covers.
- More to come
