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We at Underage Reading have sometimes expressed our consternation at the trendy headless girls (or partially headless girls) YA cover art. Now, Editorial Anonymous finally uncovers a method to the madness.

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.)

This is what my edition looks like, and while it is so very '80s (down to the very odd posing)...

...I cannot imagine who is buying this newer one. When I glanced at it I thought the boy on the cover was an old lady ghost. That can't be what they were going for.

“This” is Paula Fox’s ONE-EYED CAT, a classic (a Newbery Honor) that I discovered only recently, and the problems of the book’s beginning were heightened by the fact that I couldn’t really get my head around the character; take this scene early on:

“I believe it must be close to your birthday,” she added. Ned was surprised; grown-ups often recalled things he thought they would have forgotten.

What kid doesn’t believe adults are always thinking of them and their birthdays? I scoffed. I now think this was in character for the book’s protagonist, an extraordinarily gentle boy who makes a mistake that leads him into secrecy and misery throughout much of the book.

Paula Fox, in fact, doesn’t mess around with her characterizations. The character painted with broadest strokes in this book is one Mrs. Scallop:

Ned went over to the radio and drew a finger down the back of the bronze lion. He imagined Mrs. Scallop saying, “Mrs. Scallop doesn’t dust lions.”

Or take this exchange that I particularly related* to:

He opened his mouth and she said at once, before he could speak, “Calm down, calm down.” He hated the way she spoke in that false soothing voice, as if she owned the country of calm and he was some kind of fool who’d stumbled across its borders.

But Fox rescues Mrs. Scallop from being a parody, not by redeeming her as much as simply revealing her. At the end of the book I still didn’t like or even particularly respect her, but I truly believed in her.

What I love about Fox is how moral her books are, and by that I don’t mean that she moralizes. I mean, instead, that she presents characters whose choices matter, and she shows us how they matter not by over-dramatizing their consequences in the outside world, but by showing the characters realizing how much their own sense of themselves depends on what they do.

In ONE-EYED CAT, I also particularly like the relationship between Ned’s parents. His father is the town minister and his mother, because she is the mother in an atmospheric novel for kids, has a mysterious ailment (I believe its technical name is Disneyosis). We get tiny glimpses of the family’s complicated relationship to religion; Ned remembers that before his mother was sick, his father (who provides very loving care for his ailing wife) never spoke in his “preacher voice,” but now he sometimes uses it like a shield; Ned’s mother has her own beliefs, which are not necessarily her husband’s, and not necessarily anything she feels an urgent need to spell out to Ned. They seem like real people, in other words.

And… holy shit, you guys. Writing this post and thinking about how principled Fox’s books seem to me made me want to learn more about her, and the first thing Google has taught me? Paula Fox is Courtney Love’s grandmother.

That kind of just took the wind out of whatever I was going to write. I leave you with that odd bit of trivia.

* One of my boyfriend’s favorite ways to annoy me — one of many, I might add — is to adopt just this condescending tone. “There, there, relax,” he’ll say, just to piss me off. “Just — shhh…... Just calm down.” He does it because it drives me to violence. He perfected this technique on his sister growing up; I think it’s a wonder she still speaks to him.

Click for larger size. Or if you want to know why I’m posting this book’s cover, see here.

Last week I read GETTING THE GIRL, an early book by Markus Zusak *. Here’s the cover of my GETTING THE GIRL and an alternate cover of the same book:

These, obviously, are examples of the YA trend of cover cropping (HT: 100 Scope Notes). My question: WHY?

I mean, GETTING THE GIRL is actually all about a character who, unlike his brother, sees the girl-in-question’s humanity and personality rather than just her body. And yet.

Sarah Dessen has made a virtue of these covers, of which she’s very enamored. I read an interview with her where she talks about how she’s insisted to her publisher that her covers never show a girl’s face because she thinks “any girl” should be able to see the cover and feel like it’s her. Which kind of re-raises my frustration with her sense that all girls are white and thin (and, actually, blond, if they’re going to be one of her protagonists), but not my point at the moment.

My point is: I get why they use these covers; they work on me. I mean, I love these covers; they make me pick up the book:

… But they also kind of creep me out.

Meanwhile, you sometimes are invited to fetishize the girl’s face instead:

For all that I expressed puzzlement at John Green for covers featuring girls’ faces on books that seem ostensibly to be for boys, I give him huge props for using normal-pretty, instead of model-pretty, girls:

* who you might know from his book THE BOOK THIEF, which won a million awards including the National Book Award and is one of the best books I’ve read in many, many years, a Holocaust novel narrated by death and the only one I can think of that humanizes the German populace, but not the point of this post.