#book cover reviews

[tulip-jojo]

22nd of september,

welcoming fall today 🍁🍂

ig: tulipp.reads

[rivoluzionaria]

"Ci riconoscemmo subito; probabilmente provenivamo da un'altra vita dove non avevamo ancora finito di amarci."

— manuela g.

[apolline-lucy]

hey i did a little redesign of my book cover because i didn’t like the way the blurb was written before… how do you like it now?

check out my book, THE SILVER BIRDS, if you’re into sapphic dark fantasy with witches, monsters, spooky deaths, and a whole cast of grey characters!

[ninja-muse]

This book! This book!

I'm a fan of:

sporking fantasy tropes

female antiheroes

pop culture references

competency porn

hot messes

hot messes who somehow are also hyper-competent???

fourth wall breakage

unapologetically queer people

animal-people

time shenanigans

great fight scenes

footnotes

laughing

And this book delivered! I knew I had to read this as soon as I heard about it. (Woman caught in a time loop decides not to be the Chosen One, but the Dark Lord? Hello, yes please.)

It's been a while, like maybe a year ago with Perilous Times, since I've had so much fun with a comic fantasy. I have a serious case of the gimmes for the sequel now.

[tilbageidanmark]

Moby Dick bound in off-white Morocco leather, 280 illustrations by Rockwell Kent 1930. From Exeter Bookbinders.

[maklart]

A mock cover design for fun and to fill up the ol’ portfolio

[ID: a cover design illustration for the priory of the orange tree by samantha shannon. ead and tané are standing back to back, eyes closed and holding a sword in one hand and their respective jewels in the other. a blue dragon encircles them. behind them stands sabran, resting on the sword ascalon. in the lower corners are two ships, appearing to be sailing on dark water. the background behind sabran is yellow and brown, sunlight against dark clouds. in the upper left corner is a castle, and a dark shape in the upper right corner is reminiscent of a wyrm. in the first version of the image the title and author’s name are in the middle of the drawing. the second version is without title or author. /end ID]

[emilyscastlevania]

One of the most influential books ever.

[sunflowerofchaos]

Okay enough time has passed for me to throw my two cents into the Bridgerton discourse. Many are displeased with the season and part 2 specifically. I have been trying to piece together what my issues were with it and I hope that someone can find this and maybe find something that clicks as to why the season may have been disappointing.

I am a big polin stan. In fact I started watching for and because of them. Totally believed in the supremacy of their story because of their adorable friendship and the long build up ever since the pilot.

I loved part one. That will be controversial but I truly did. Was the pacing a bit off? Yes it was!

But did it give us the romcom atmosphere, the yearning, the love? Yes definitely! I'll even argue that part one, the going from "friendship to love" is done more beautifully in the show than in the book. People said one kiss is all it takes for Colin but that's really not true in the show. If you take account of the history we have because of season 1 and 2 it doesn't feel that way.

And the funny thing is that despite part one having a bunch of side plots, it worked. It was walking on the edge of being too much but it didn't cross the line.

Not yet anyways... so here are my 6 big errors of part 2

Like everyone I was way too hyped after the carriage scene, which leads to..

Error number 1: The break after the carriage scene set the bar too high. The long break filled with press and interviews further hyping up part 2 after that high consequently did damage to the reception of part 2. I believe that almost anything after the carriage would appear as a let down due to the wait. That's kind of unfair to the show I know, but it also makes sense as we, the audience would have abnormally high expectations that are difficult to please.

Part 2 is flawed and there is no arguing that. The beginning of it felt like a let down due to the split right after the carriage scene aka the climax of part 1 (pun intended) but fine objectively speaking episode 5 and 6 are nice. But then comes error number 2, the fact that we have 2 episodes where their love is clouded by the secret of lady whistledown. I feel like that was problematic to the pacing of part 2 (which is a problem in itself). The tension in episode 5 was necessary but also so much. So much that Colin literally questions her feelings. Then episode 6 instead of lifting that cloud sooner, continues to sour the polin scenes until the very end of the episode. The reveal should have been earlier in episode 6, so they have time to properly heal and be happy. (Seperate errors that I will adress)

Error number 3 is how the wedding fell under the dark cloud of the angst. I was wishing it would be the happy wedding of bridgerton and it was happier than Daphne's or Anthony's (not that we saw the real one) but the queen disrupting the wedding felt like another punch. One more time we were close to seeing their happiness but couldn't. (Something we barely get to see at all)

Then error number 4 (my personal enemy). The pacing of the conflict and healing. The way Colin was hurting was amazingly portrayed by Luke and I even understand how Colin wanted to hurt Pen with the entrapment comment and unlike many I won't hate him for it at all. But one thing where the writing really failed me is how polin shared a number of scenes that could've had a bigger role in their healing but ultimately didn't. I will list the scenes and how EVERYTIME we think they are a step closer to healing, they go back to square one and how that effects the scene where they eventually do "heal".

Exhibit A: The modiste scene. Beautiful confrontation and it really set up the possibility of them talking through it more but then it ends abruptly with Colin shutting down (however I'm inclined to give this one some saving grace because at least they talk)

Exhibit B: The wedding. Colin once again gives us hope that perhaps they're closer to making up but when Colin walked away with Pen and they had a second confrontation where she states that she is lady whistledown, I expected Colin to at least accept that statement and not revert back to being in denial about it afterwards and shutting down again. This could've been the scene where Colin starts to accept them as one. (Not to take away from the letters scene but it would have been a great foundation for it)

Exhibit C: The bedroom scene. Ah my personal nominee. This scene could've been so much more and no I don't mean a sexy scene. This scene could've been thee scene where they talk. It would've felt more powerful to have the talk that they have in Bridgerton house in their bedroom instead. I can't stress how it would've fit perfectly and been book compliant. If they had utilized this scene better, then polin being at Fran's wedding the next day would've have felt more emotional and helped convince us of them gradually solving the conflict. Netflix, that wouldn't even take from your running time. Pen could've confronted him there as she did in the book. Colin could've faced his jealousy right then and there instead of having Cressida point it out for him and still not facing it.

Exhibit D: Bridgerton house. Yes they do talk here and you can see that scene as the one where they settle things prior to the ball, BUT one it is too close to the end and it feels cut short which frankly doesn't seem enough for the viewers to believe that they now have joined hands. This scene was personally not enough for me. I think if you expand the conversation it would be much better or again if you put this dialogue in the bedroom scene it would have been powerful and helped the pacing as the bedroom scene was in the first half of the finale and this one way too close to the ball.

You'll see that every scene post reveal is following the same frustrating pattern of them brushing over the problem. You in turn get your hopes up for it to develop further into forgiveness, then voila Colin shuts down and goes back to square one. That was extremely frustrating for me as a viewer as it happened multiple times, especially since it seems ridiculous to leave the conflict in the air till the last 10 minutes when they have had several opportunities to solve it sooner. Colin's peace at the end comes too suddenly as those previous scenes don't see him gradually make peace with the matter but always shutting down and running. Those scenes could have been used to show the steps of him gradually getting over it, forgiving her and facing himself.

Error number 5. The side plots and overall pacing.. As I said part 1 walked the fine line but part 2 crossed it. What do you mean that we get more scenes of secondary characters than polin getting over their conflict and having some time to see their happiness. That messes with the pacing, making part 2 seem to want to cram up as much plot as possible. You have Francesca's love match, Benedict's exploration, Eloise's general conflict and dynamic with Cressida, Cressida's own story, Violet's arc, lady Danbury and her brother's conflict, the Mondrichs arc, the solicitor, queen etc...

This season was simply TOO ambitious for its own good. It tried to do too much. Suddenly it didn't feel like polin season but rather the season to set everything up for the next season and that really hurts as a polin fan.

Finally error number six which is by far the most famous error. The lack of happy polin. As I explained episode 5 and 6 while showed some happiness it didn't feel real because of the secret constantly hanging around. They were happy but you as a viewer might have felt more worried and had a more bittersweet feeling. Especially when you see Colin get more and more anxious and insecure during those episodes. Then episode 7 and 8 sees them miserable most of the time. That sucks even though it is necessary it still sucks. Sucks because after all that put together we don't get to see it pay off. 4 episodes of angst and they give you one scene that suddenly heals it, 10 seconds sexy scene and an epilogue scene where they suddenly have a baby. It is simply not enough to balance out the dark vibe of the entirety of part 2. That is why thousands of people are hanging onto the petition to release the deleted scenes. So we can finally see the pay off of the angst and can properly balance out the emotions that came with it and move on.

Not to mention the absolutely wasted confession of Colin Bridgerton.. when he said I love you at the end of episode 8 I was already thinking "with everything that you are, everything you have been and everything you hope to be????!!!" But then he didn't say it and I was confused as to why they would possibly not use THEE love confession??? Since that's Bridgertons thing??? Having incredible confessions... And it's not like it didn't fit in fact it would have fit so well. At this point if you squint you might imagine hearing luke continuing the line for God's sake. That remains a mystery that makes no sense to me.

So by now I don't think anyone got that far and I can't complain because I wrote this for me. To structure my thoughts and make peace with it. And so to sum up these errors: the split, the structure of episode 5/6, the wedding sadness, the way the conflict/healing was handled, the pacing with the side plots and the lack of happiness to counteract the angst. I will revisit part 1 happily and just stop after the mirror lol. I will look forward to seeing polin happy in 2 years I guess.. and I do believe that when season 4 comes out and they're happy and are hanging around we will accept season 3 way more and come to hopefully love it.

[abybweisse]

Ch212 (p0), Cover and title pages

Now that I have my own copy from Kobo.

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

Compound Fracture

YA thriller set in rural West Virginia

follows an autistic trans boy who survives being almost killed by the Sheriff’s son after a party, and accidentally kills one of the boys who hurt him when he tries to get back at him

and is pulled head-first back into the 100 year old feud between his & the sheriff’s families, that began when his great-great grandfather was executed after inciting a miner’s rebellion, the grandfather whose ghost has started to haunt him

community & family & socialist revolution

aro-questioning MC

arc from netgalley, out september 3

[rochellehassan]

The Spell for Unraveling (book 3 of The Buried and the Bound trilogy) has a cover! behold!

i think this is my favorite one yet! i love the stained glass background so much <3 the artist is helen mask, who's done an amazing job on all three covers for this trilogy.

[the---hermit]

A Psalm For The Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

I loved everything about this little book. When I first started seeing this cover online I didn't pay too much attention, until the day in which I heard a bit more about it. When I heard not only it's a cozy scifi but the main character is a tea monk I knew I had to have this. The story follows Sibling Dex, a tea monk living in a world where robots have left humans. After awakening robots had decided to leave humans and retreat into nature, and when the story of the book takes place the world has already moved on and readjusted to the change. In their travels Dex will meet a wild robot, and I won't add much more because I don't want to spoil the story. This book healed my soul, it gave me so much existential peace, it was the perfect thing to pick up right now. It's a comforting and calming story that brought me so much joy over simple things, I loved every second I spent with it. I cannot wait to read the sequel and I am sure I will be rereading this in the future. It made into the list of my comfort books. I highly recommend it to everyone, even if scifi isn't usually your thing, if you want to spend your time with a book that will warm your heart and make you smile this is what you should be reading.

[bonefall]

I do feel bad for Owen. Clearly this is NOT his forte. #freeowen

I'm guessing Owen has some kind of contract to do all the covers for the "Erin Hunter" books, since he also seems to do the art for Bravelands and Survivors. Which baffles me.

When you look at his portfolio, it seems clear that animals are NOT his strong suit. He mostly designs them as monsters or setpieces, not as characters in their own right. His humans, objects, and backgrounds are excellent, while his animals are quite generic-- So why did they choose this artist to design for their xenofiction series?

The art he does for Percy Jackson and Artemis Fowl is not as jilted and uninspired as his work for any of the Erin Hunter series. He does have a thing for harsh lighting (too harsh for my taste) but the composition is fine and the characters are recognizable. Certainly not "someone tried to unlock your phone" tier. It's strange.

It strikes me like he's not "comfortable" enough with animals to experiment with them, heavily referencing zoomed-in photos and leaving it there. Note how his cats are almost never doing anything, just sitting or standing around looking confused.

Has he ever even drawn a battle cat... battling?

I don't really feel "bad" for him, OR "mad" at him, because we have no idea what's happening behind the scenes, but I WILL say that I feel he is an absolutely awful match for WC. I don't understand what about his portfolio made him look like a good replacement for Wayne McLoughlin, besides some executive recognizing his style from somewhere else.

I hope he is compensated well for his work, but I don't buy hardcovers because of his art and am holding out hope that someone else takes over someday.

[ninja-muse]

Does anyone want a gender-swapped far-future Indian retelling of Aladdin with a subplot involving robot kaiju battles? How about a sci-fi novel full of anticolonial resistance and borderline unlikable characters that is also action-packed and funny? A book that moves from "sure, that might as well happen" to "oh, that got real" over the course of a page, and you both can and cannot trust the narrator?

That said, this is a good book but not a great one. For all the detail that Basu's poured into this, everything from street bazaars to tech terms used out of their present contexts to stoic superpowered space heroes to the incorporation of robots and AIs, the world of Shantiport still never felt real, and there was a little bit more "sure, why not" than I personally like in a plot. It also took a while for me to warm up to "Aladdin" and feel like I understood her, and some minor characters felt one-dimensional or archetypal. But a lot of that comes from the narrative POV, which is necessary to the story and so cool, and the rest comes from anime, Bollywood, and other pop culture tropes and Basu's intent to make this feel cinematic, which is all fair. This isn't a novel so concerned with a finely drawn world that it disregards set pieces and writes out all daring rooftop chases and improbable coincidences.

In short, this is a book that is both intensely smart but is also written to entertain. It was delightful to see all the Aladdin moments in this future context, and even better to see Basu using the story to talk about individual rights, corruption, colonization, oppression, resistance, and reclamation.* The set pieces were great, don't get me wrong. I loved the heck out of the world and how he conveyed it. I loved the narrator even more. (I'm going to call Basu masterful just for what he did with them.) I loved never quite knowing what to expect, either from Basu or the characters, and how what felt like extraneous moments or subplots got tied back in. The villain and the jinn were both fantastic. It's chewy in the way of sci-fi with a point. It made me laugh.

So yes, while it's not a perfect book, it's still pretty darn good and worth the read. It would have been a highlight of my reading month even if August hadn't been as lukewarm as it was, and I'll be watching for whatever Basu puts out next. Well worth the 10 months it spent on my TBR….

*Would it have been nice to see more of that rather than being told? Sure, but I'm not sure how Basu could have worked that in without breaking something more central to the book.

[see-arcane]

Lucy Undying came out a few days ago and

"It's a feminist retelling, giving Lucy the agency she so lacked in Dracula."

I am putting feminist retellings on the top shelf unit we all consider if sometimes lack of agency of a character in a story was the point

In fairness, I get the 'why' behind stuff like this.

Lucy's story is painful. It is scary and tragic and ends cruelly for her, just like so many tales of female victims before and after her. Though her death(s) have a real narrative and an emotional point, whereas your average damsel is nothing but an extra pound of meat for the grinder to help add more woe to Hero Man's story. It hurts more with her.

She stands apart from the common fridged woman by being someone we know, someone loved, someone killed and remade into a bloodstained caricature of herself to be her attacker's eternal slave. Ending her existence in that second iteration is mercy, practicality, and the setting of the stakes for Mina when Dracula targets her. If the monster doesn't kill you, the heroes will put you down for becoming a monster too. Which itself ripples out into new moral conundrums when we see how staunchly Jonathan refuses to risk destroying Mina in any form; making us question in turn whether there really was hope for Lucy the Bloofer Lady--who had killed no one yet!--if only Van Helsing and the Suitor Squad had tried another angle. It makes you chew on the implications.

So, I get it. We all want to save the character we love and who got crushed underfoot by the plot.

The problem comes in when to do that literary rescue, you completely obliterate everything about that character which makes them themselves and not Generic Strong Spunky Female #1897. And the book's summary doesn't give me much hope for this not being the case.

Her name was written in the pages of someone else’s story: Lucy Westenra was one of Dracula’s first victims. But her death was only the beginning. Lucy rose from the grave a vampire and has spent her immortal life trying to escape from Dracula’s clutches—and trying to discover who she really is and what she truly wants. Her undead life takes an unexpected turn in twenty-first-century London, when she meets another woman, Iris, who is also yearning to break free from her past. Iris’s family has built a health empire based on a sinister secret, and they’ll do anything to stay in power. Lucy has long believed she would never love again. Yet she finds herself compelled by the charming Iris while Iris is equally mesmerized by the confident and glamorous Lucy. But their intense connection and blossoming love is threatened by outside forces. Iris’s mother won’t let go of her without a fight, and Lucy’s past still has fangs: Dracula is on the prowl once more. Lucy Westenra has been a tragically murdered teen, a lonesome adventurer, and a fearsome hunter, but happiness has always eluded her. Can she find the strength to destroy Dracula once and for all, or will her heart once again be her undoing?

Now, if the name here was different? If this was, I don't know, 'Lorelei Wilder' thwarting her monstrous master 'Count Lord Duke Dracattackula,' that'd be fine. But the fact that it's trying to convince me that the central character is Lucy Westenra, the girl we know through others' words and her own as a human, and through the lens of others' witness accounts as an apparently merrily content monster as the distorted Bloofer Lady, makes me fear the worst: That our girl's been girlbossed out of recognition.

I won't pass immediate judgment. Maybe it's a hidden gem. Maybe a century's worth of character development has altered Bloofer Lucy into this form believably and the author hasn't just retroactively taken an eraser to everything she was pre and post-vampirism in order to make Standard Rebellious Hero Girl (now with public domain name!). I'll cross my fingers for it.

But I won't hold my breath.

[foxcort]

sad because i love the concept of dragon riders and dragons and the book covers for the e.mpyrean series look so aesthetically pleasing but i will not give a single penny to the horrible lady writing those books