The Liar Cover Controversy

I don't know how many of you have been reading about the controversy over the cover of Justine Larbalestier's new book Liar. In case you've missed it, let me briefly catch you up. Justine is an Australian author who has written a number of highly regarded books. I have come late to the Justine party--the only one of her books that I've read is How to Ditch Your Fairy--so I didn't realize until this controversy erupted that she makes a point of writing about nonwhite characters. Her new book, which will come out at the end of September, is called Liar and the main character is a black teen who is proud of her short nappy hair. She is also a compulsive liar who is trying to break that habit.

The Australian cover for the book uses the letters L, I, A, R in different configurations. The American cover uses a black-and-white photograph of a white girl with long hair which crosses over the bottom of her face, covering her mouth. The controversy erupted over the disconnect between the cover image and the actual character described in the book. This more than putting a blonde on a cover when the text specifically describes a brunette (seriously--don't you sometimes wonder if the publisher/designer/artist has even read the book?) Many bloggers have seen this as an egregious example of whitewashing books that feature characters of color. In a very thoughtful blog post, Justine discusses the controversy and gives some insight into the designing of books. She does not like the American cover and fought against it, but authors have little say in such matters. One thing in that post that really struck me was that the attitude that pictures of black people on book covers do not sell--which just seems to confirm the whitewashing accusation.

Now as librarian, I very rarely buy books based on their covers. I make my selections based on reviews (both from professional journals and blogs) and patron requests. Most of the time, I do not even see what a book looks like until it has been purchased, cataloged, and put on my shelves. But this discussion has got me wondering about the covers of the books in my J and my YA section. How many do I have with people of color on the cover? How many with white people? How many with no human figures at all? Well, I don't have time right now to go back to the shelves, pull every book off, and analyze its cover, but I did just get eight new books in from the cataloging department--so let's look at those:

12 Brown Boys by Omar Tyree. Graphic illustration using silhouettes, but they are recognizably black. A photo of the author is included on the back cover. From the back cover: 12 Brown Boys by Omar Tyree is a collection of short stories that focuses on the lives of Black pre-teen boys. Readers will connect with Tyree's engaging characters including: Red Head Mike who hates his nickname, but hates his red hair even more. Chestnut, who is sent to live with relatives down south to keep him out of trouble in his Brooklyn neighborhood. William the Santa Monica super kid whose status as a scholar and entrepreneur has even his best friends hating him. Wayne, who resents his role as the oldest child until a tragedy strikes the family. Tyree has assembled a wide range of characters that reflect the diversity of experiences of Black boys - characters that are funny, serious, edgy, street-wise, studious, and all unforgettable.

Absolutely Maybe by Lisa Yee. Photograph of white girl with pink hair lying on a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Summary: When living with her mother, an alcoholic ex-beauty queen, becomes unbearable, almost seventeen-year-old Maybelline "Maybe" Chestnut runs away to California, where she finds work on a taco truck and tries to track down her birth father.




Best Friends by Jacqueline Wilson. Cartoon-like illustrations of the two white girls who are the main characters, though the human figures are just a small part of the cover. Summary: Rambunctious and irrepressible Gemma has been best friends with Alice ever since they were born on the same day, so when Alice moves miles away to Scotland, Gemma is distraught over the idea that Alice might find a new best friend.




The Calder Game by Blue Balliett. Illustrations of the three main characters--two boys and a girl--all 3 white Though the illustrations take up most of the cover, the two lower pictures are rather small. Summary: When seventh-grader Calder Pillay disappears from a remote English village--along with an Alexander Calder sculpture to which he has felt strangely drawn--his friends Petra and Tommy fly from Chicago to help his father find him.





The Door of No Return by Sarah Mussi. Photograph of young (and very nice looking) black man. Summary: Sixteen-year-old Zac never believed his grandfather's tales about their enslaved ancestors being descended from an African king, but when his grandfather is murdered and the villains come after Zac, he sets out for Ghana to find King Baktu's long-lost treasure before the murderers do.




Dragon Flight by Jessica Day George. Large purple dragon with a young boy and girl, both white The image of the dragon dominates, with the humans rather small. Summary: Young seamstress Creel finds herself strategizing with the dragon king Shardas once again when a renegade dragon in a distant country launches a war against their country, bringing an entire army of dragons into the mix.





Max by James Patterson. The title takes up most of the space on this cover. At the top is a small photo-realistic illustration of a girl mostly silhouetted by shadows but hair and arms indicate she is white. Summary: When millions of fish start dying off the coast of Hawaii and something is destroying hundreds of ships, the government enlists the Flock--a band of genetically modified children who can fly--to help get to the bottom of the disaster before it is too late.



Starclimber by Kenneth Oppel. Silhouetted figures of a boy and girl, both white. (This cover strongly reminds me of Patrick Ness's great novel The Knife of Never Letting Go.) Summary: As members of the first crew of astralnauts, Matt Cruse and Kate De Vries journey into outer space on the Starclimber and face a series of catastrophes that threaten the survival of all on board.





So how can we sort these covers? Let's see--we have 2 photographs and 6 illustrations. We have 3 that feature a single character while 5 feature multiple characters. Half of them use character illustrations so small that they are barely noticeable; only two use a human image that dominates the cover. Three covers use silhouettes. Two covers feature black characters while 6 are white. Which ones will wind up being the most popular? That is a question that I won't be able to answer until my next inventory/circulation survey.

It's an interesting issue to ponder. How much does the cover picture really influence whether or not you pick up a book? I'm more likely to pick up a book because I like the author or the book is part of a series I enjoy. A cover illustration might catch my eye, but a clever title will do that too, even on a plain or dull background. It's the the text on the jacket flap (for a hardback) or the back cover (for a paperback) will determine whether I decide to read it or put it back on the shelf.

And here's another thought--do you select books differently when you're in a bookstore than you do in a library? Are you more likely to give a library book a try when you know that you don't have to pay for it? Are covers more important when selling a book than they are in checking out a book?

What do you think?

Evolution, Me & Other Freaks of Nature by Robin Brande

Main character: High school freshman Mena Reece
Location: Not defined
Time period: Contemporary
Genre: YA Fiction

Evolution, Me & Other Freaks of Nature is the first YA novel I've read that deals with the debate between evolution and intelligent design or, as some might frame it, science vs. religion. It is a pleasant enough read, though ultimately disappointing.

Mena Reece is not looking forward to her first day of high school. She has done something which has turned her entire conservative Christian church community against her. Her minister has denounced her from the pulpit, and even her parents are barely speaking to her because their insurance business is so closely tied to the church and they are worried that she will cost them customers. Since she is being shunned by her former friends, she begins to interact with other classmates that she never would have otherwise, including brainy Casey, her science lab partner. Casey introduces her to science fiction and fantasy, which is not as evil as she has been told.

When her science teacher, Ms. Shepherd, begins to teach a unit on evolution, Mena's church organizes a protest and demands that she also teach intelligent design. Ms. Shepherd steadfastly refuses to do so. The classroom becomes a battleground of strong wills, with Ms. Sherherd continuing to teach the unit and the protesting students turning their backs the moment the word evolution is mentioned. Then the unit is over and the class moves on to another subject.

Let me say that I am fully on the evolution side of this debate. But I have to say that this book came off as one-sided. I liked the portrayal of the teacher and her calm but firm way of dealing with the protesters. Mena and Casey are also appealing characters. I like their growing friendship and how Mena's world opens up because of him and his family. But the Christian students are portrayed as horrid, close-minded puppets who just parrot the hateful rantings of their preacher. The only one that that is not a vindictive "mean girl" is the minister's daughter who is so meek and mild that she is totally ineffectual. In the end, Mena and her parents join another church--one which (shock!) the science teacher Ms. Shepherd attends--which is much more accepting of different opinions. (And just where were these people during the rest of the book?)

In the end, I don't think that this book is going to persuade anyone to change their minds.

Evolution, Me & Other Freaks of Nature is on the 2009-2010 Lone Star Reading List.

Listen! by Stephanie S. Tolan

Main character: 12-year-old Charley (that's short for Charlene)
Location: rural North Carolina
Time period: Contemporary
Genre: J Fiction, Dog stories

This is a loving and gentle book about a broken girl and a lost dog, and how they save each other over a summer.

Charley is recovering from a car accident in which she broke her leg. More than that, she is still recovering from her mother's death a few years ago. Charley has a tendency to avoid her pain--when her best friend Amy announced she was going away to a tennis camp for the summer, Charley deleted all of the pictures of the two of them off of her computer. When her mother, a famous nature photographer, was killed in a plane crash in Brazil, Charley took down all of her mother's photographs that were hanging in her room. Since then, she has avoided her mother's office and her mother's favorite places in the woods around the lake where they live.

So now Charley is facing a lonely summer with little to do beyond taking long walks to strengthen her leg. As she walks around the lake, she notices a feral dog who seems to appear and disappear like a ghost. Talking to some of her neighbors, she learns that the dog has been around for almost a year and has survived a cold winter on its own. Charley takes it into her head that she needs to help this dog--to try to tame it and give it food and shelter. She shows a great deal of patience in this exercise, for the dog is very skittish and shy of people. Slowly she gets the dog, whom she names Coyote, to trust her and to eat the food she puts out, but she doubts that she'll ever get the dog to accept a collar and leash and submit to a trip to the vet--two conditions her father places on her project.

As she heals Coyote's skittishness and fear of people, he begins to heal her. Walking in the woods exercises and strengthens her leg, and visiting some of the quiet places she has avoided since her mother's death finally allows her to face her loss and grieve. Have a box of kleenex handy--this scene brought tears to my eyes.

The Great Wide Sea by M.H. Herlong

Main character: 16-year-old Ben, and his younger brothers Dylan and Gerry
Location: the Caribbean
Time period: Contemporary
Genre: YA Fiction, Survival, Grief

You know how some books have a short one or two sentence summary? You usually see in on the back of the title page, and in library catalogs. The summary for this book says: "Still mourning the death of their mother, three brothers go with their father on an extended sailing trip off the Florida Keys and have a harrowing adventure at sea." While that is factually correct, it does nothing to prepare you for this book. Much better is the paragraph on the second page of the prologue:

"I don't tell about the morning when we woke up and Dad was gone. I don't talk about the storm. Or when we wrecked on the coral reef. I don't talk about--I never will talk about--when I left Gerry alone, standing there on the empty beach of that desert island with Dylan dying at his feet."

With THAT as in introduction, you start off the book with a deep sense of foreboding, alert for the coming disasters.

After their mom dies in a car accident, Dad goes off the deep end. Without telling the boys, he puts the house up for sale and purchases a sailboat which they will pick up down in the Florida Keys and then sail around the Caribbean for a year. He gives a book to Ben on small engine repair because Ben will be the engineer and a book on navigating by the stars to Dylan since he will be the navigator. They have a very short time to pack what they want to keep, but only what will fit in a duffel bag. Ben is especially upset when his dad packs up everything that belonged to his mom; it's as if his dad had already forgotten her and wants to wipe every trace of her away. On board he becomes a tyrant, never discussing things with the boys, only telling them that this is the way things will be done. Every day, Ben's anger grows until he is barely able to speak to his dad.

Harrowing is a good word for what happens to the three boys. After their father disappears, Ben is forced to make decisions that have life or death consequences not only for him, but for his brothers as well.

The Great Wide Sea is on the 2009-2010 Texas Lone Star Book List.

Streams of Babel by Carol Plum-Ucci

Main characters: An ensemble cast, including American teens Cora, Scott, Owen and Rain, Pakistani Shahzad, and Korean immigrant Tyler Ping
Location: mostly New Jersey but also a small village in Pakistan
Time period: Spring 2002
Genre: YA Fiction, Suspense, Thriller, Espionage

I started this book in a "now" mind-set and as such it seemed especially timely given the current swine flu concerns. It took me a little while to pay attention to the date headings on each chapter and realize that it is set in 2002, just a few months after the Towers fell. It is a 2008 release, and I wonder if the author started it in 2002 but it has taken this long to be released or if it was a conscious decision to set it in the recent past, when concerns about terrorism were still fresh and raw.

In a suburban town in New Jersey called Trinity Hills, two women living on the same street die of brain aneurysms within a 24 hour period. Their teen-aged children along with another neighbor display symptoms that seem like the flu and yet are not the flu. Halfway across the world, a teenage computer genius working in his uncle's internet cafe eavesdrops on terrorists in chat rooms and reports to US Intelligence what he learns--that someone has mutated a virus into something undetectable and incurable, and it has been released into the water supply in such a way as to affect only a five-block section of a place code-named Colony One.

The story is told from multiple POVs, through the voices of the six teenagers caught up in events far beyond them. This is a very effective way to tell the story, since no one character has the whole story--something that Shahzad finds increasingly frustrating and causes him to take serious risks. I really liked this narration technique in the first half of the book as you get to know the four neighbors through their own eyes and as others see them. Cora is ashamed of her morphine-addicted mother who abandoned her as a child and only came home a few years ago. Believing herself unloved, she has kept to herself, rigid against any hurt. The others, especially the boys, see her as beautiful but aloof, somehow above them all. Owen thinks of himself as selfish and moody; his mother and brother see him as selfless, giving, and possibly destined for a religious life. Scott, as a paramedic, sees their growing illness and tries to isolate them from the healthy which allows them, the ill, to come together and form the bonds of friendship.

Are teenaged computer geniuses in danger of becoming a cliche? I'm thinking of some recent books I've read--Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, Icecore by Matt Whyman, Rash by Peter Hautman--and they all feature computer geniuses/hackers. This book has two--Shahzad and Tyler. They worked well in this story, and I loved the line (repeated a few times) "Computers have blurred the line between child and adult, because in the land of computers, children are the men, and the men are the children." Who hasn't felt that way sometimes?