#miri larensdaughter

[senadimell]

couldn’t find a good high resolution picture online, so here’s my battered copy.

Cover art by Tim Zeltner and design by Lizzy Bromley. (Oddly enough, I couldn’t find a website for Tim Zeltner, but I did find a collection of his art here: https://i2iart.com/tim-zeltner)*

I adore the original cover of Princess Academy. It transformed a “book I’m probably not that interested” in into a “I need to read this book now” kind of book. I love the folk look, and it matches the chapter heading quarry-speech poems perfectly. The color scheme is beautiful, and the overall quality is dreamlike, yet homely. It also captures the feeling of the book in a way few covers do. 

I just love the girls on the cover. It avoids the trap that so many more recent renditions fall into: they have a smiling picture of the main character, or maybe a few of them, and while pretty, most of them hit a particular pet peeve: they’re just too current. They look like models, and I can easily see them being dated in 15 years just like so many bad 80s fantasy covers. The girls are cute and their dresses are something you’d want to wear, but they’re feminine and Generic!fairy-tale with lace-up fronts, blousy under-layers and fluffy sleeves. 

These girls don’t wear form-fitting dresses.Their dresses are muted, but patchwork and colorful. Their hair is loose or braided, and some girls have quite long hair in simple styles. They look like mountain girls: they are not sophisticated, but they are honest and strong. The girls in Princess Academy have grown up poor, and going hungry is a daily reality for them, so I like how the cover reflects the simplicity in their lives: the academy is the only “fancy” thing in sight. It reflects one of the poems from the book:

Water in the porridge

And salt in the gruel

Doesn’t make a belly

Full, not a bellyful

Another detail I love is on the back cover: who is the girl left behind? One of the main themes of the book is community, and deals with both the promise of belonging and the struggle of loneliness and isolation. There are at least three candidates for the left-behind girl: 

Miri, our spirited main character who uses humor to make a place for herself in a world where she feels too small and useless to be valuable. She isn’t allowed to work with everyone her age in the quarry and constantly feels like she’s catching up. Despite a generally gregarious personality, she struggles to deal with the strict school environment and ends up isolating herself from most of her peers for a good portion of the book. 

Britta, a girl from the lowlands sent up to live on the mountain. Until Miri befriends her, she’s completely isolated from the tight-knit community. She has a completely different upbringing and conceals a lot about herself so she won’t ostracize herself.

Katar, a girl who’s whip-smart and poised. She can knock anyone down to size, but for all her talent she’s deeply insecure and lonely; you just wouldn’t be able to tell by looking. 

You also get a strong feeling that we’re in a village on top of the world, up in the clouds with swirling mists below. The mountains stand close around, and you can’t really see the world below, which is fitting, as most people have never even left their village. The sense of place sets this book apart from so many others; the prose is evocative and I can’t think of the book without thinking of the rocks and the dust in the stream and the mist below and the tiny flowers where little green grows. 

Possibly my favorite idiosyncratic thing about the cover: the girls are holding hands. That’s a small detail in the book: people hold hands because they live in a quarry surrounded by abandoned quarries. There’s loose rock and old holes, and in the winter, you can’t see solid footing. I love that kind of casual human contact. Boys and girls stop holding hands when they’re older, but the girls continue it as a sign of casual friendship. It’s a small detail I’m in love with, so I’m thrilled it made it to the cover. It also makes the themes of loneliness more compelling: even in a tight-knit community, it’s so easy to feel alone.

All I know are

Scraps, flakes, chips, rocks

All below are

Stones, shards, bits, dross

One thing I love about this cover is the sense of community you get while looking at it, which is a huge theme in the book. The climax of the book is achieved by teamwork: first the girls, who have been divided from the academy’s competitive nature, and then the villagers, who have been divided from their girls. 

As an aside, I love the font as well. 

Now, for more fun, let’s compare covers. 

What is this airbrushed version doing here? It’s the cover picture for an Amazon listing, and I can’t make heads or tails of it. As a general rule, I don’t like pictures on my covers, but at least the first one looks like Miri would: freckles, slightly windblown hair, and the hint of a smirk. You can tell she’s a girl with a sense of humor and an opinion. More than that, she looks like a girl, not a teenager in suburbia. Her dress could also be homespun. Then we get the above picture? Shiny cheeks, little-mermaid/Ariel lips, smooth “I used silicone conditioner then blowdried then straightened my hair before braiding it?” She just looks photoshopped, which is the opposite of Miri.  

And here’s another airbrushed version!

I get it: she’s in the city and looking pretty. But really? For someone who spends her time split between university and salon-style revolution with a few jaunts to a stone carver’s studio, I can’t help but think Miri’s not going to spend much time plaiting her hair with flowers (despite what the robin’s-egg-blue color might have you believe, those are university-issue robes) Ugh. Not a fan of these.

These next few ones are the most recent US covers, I believe. I think they represent an appealing, marketable cover--I imagine they probably sell better than the original cover. 

The thing is, they just look kind of generic to me. The setting is such a powerful part of the story, but I’m not getting it from these pictures, though the last one does a better job. They also faintly scream “fairytale retelling,” but these books actually aren’t fairy-tale retellings, unlike many of Shannon Hale’s other books. Still: for all that, I think they probably sell better than the original cover. 

For fun: Here’s a post about the international art for the covers. None surpasses  Tim Zeltner’s, in my opinion, but there are some beautiful ones!

https://www.squeetus.com/2012/04/an-international-gallery-of-princess-academy.html

And now for some shenanigans: 

This monstrosity is apparently the Norwegian cover. What even...The font on Shannon Hale’s name? He is wearing no clothes? They are wrapped in a blanket? This looks like some bad Norwegian version of those Scottish laird romance novels... I guess at least there are flowers in a token to Miri’s namesake?

*Tim Zeltner seems to use a lot of green in his work, but there’s almost none here. Again, that’s fitting to the setting, where little grows.

**I was originally planning on sharing some of Shannon Hale’s other books bearing beautiful covers in this post, but this turned out longer than I expected. Now they’ll get separate ones!

[senadimell]

Okay actually I lied. Most of my favorites are pretty wholesome now that I think about it.