cover love: the first contender |

Y’all, I’m a huge Courtney Summers fangirl. Not only was her debut novel mentioned in the prior post, but I’ve been on pins and needles waiting for her third novel’s cover since…like…ever. (“Ever” meaning a few months, but, well.. semantics)

I have a list of a few covers that I wanted to explore, and had my neat little schedule of how I was going to go about posting over the next week or so, but then, bam, guess who debuts her cover for Fall for Anything, today of all days?

Courtney, St. Martin’s Press done DID YOU RIGHT.

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Looking at Fall for Anything‘s cover, my first reaction was “Oh dear, look. At. The. Mood.” The simple color grading from the burnt red to bronze overtones, the girl’s head down, in what, grief? Depression? Why does she look so sad?! Way to set a mood, St. Martin’s Press.

SMP also kept the same font for her name from her other two novels, which ties them all together in a very simple way. But this cover, this little beaut, it just emanates emotion. You just know something dramatic is going down in this one.

And my favorite part? The title’s typeface, how each character interacts. Is that custom illustration? Hmm – the n’s and l’s look too similar. There is balance and chaos in this novel’s cover, from its scribbly font, to its hanging photographs, to its centered title. There’s an additional beauty in its depth of field.

Let me be the first to admit that I’m not the biggest fan of angsty faces on novels. (Vampire Academy, anyone?) I think that when a publisher puts a specific face on a cover, readers have already been robbed (dramatic terminology, no?) of what they believe that a protagonist looks like in their head. Descriptions in a novel are one thing, but when you throw a photograph on a cover, you’re basically saying, “This is what Protag looks like. Oh, and she has Crazyface. End of story.” While Cracked Up to Be and Some Girls Are revealed more and more of each protagonist’s face, this cover did it in such a manner that I didn’t recoil. At all.

Had I not already read Courtney’s work and seen this on my book retailer’s shelves, I would’ve swiped it at first glance to read its synopsis. Message received. And mission accomplished.

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