It's Important to Hold on to Your Imagination...or Delusions, either works.

CLICK! I may have made this one too long...

And if you haven't been reading the blog in the last week you should go back. We celebrating Children's Author and Illustrator week by posting something kids section related every week!

If It's What's Inside That Counts Why Did You Have to Change the Cover?

Hullo!

First off, I want to tell you the three books I am most excited about us getting in the kids department since I last spoke to you:
1. Lola and the Boy Next Door by Stephanie Perkins (my love for it's companion book Anna and the French Kiss is pretty much legendary).
2. Journey by Aaron Becker (Shoshana called it Harold and the Purple Crayon meets The Wizard of Oz).
3. The Boy Who Swam with Piranhas by David Almond (I have a thing about piranhas plus a childhood love of David Almond and a current love of illustrator Oliver Jeffers).

Now on to today's ramble.

So, I’m kind of a Harry Potter fan (says the girl with the sign of the Deathly Hallows tattooed on her wrist while wearing a tee-shirt with the Hogwarts crest on it) and in case anyone was unaware, at the end of this month Scholastic is releasing a new set of Harry Potter books. These paperback versions will feature the art of Kazu Kibuishi (of Amulet graphic novel fame). The art itself has already been released for our devouring pleasure and they’re brilliant but I’m not sure I’m happy about it.

I have really mixed feelings about the matter. Kibuishi does beautiful artwork but, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, I’m a pretty sentimental creature so the Mary GrandPre covers will always be my Harry Potter covers. I remember waiting for the release of the cover images and in some ways they are the Harry Potter books for me. The thought of those illustrations becoming harder to come by (the original covers will only be available in hardcover, though, it will take a while for them to die off in paper, I imagine) makes my heart hurt a little.

On the other hand, I also collect different editions of the books so I’m kind of excited/exasperated that there is (yet) another set for me to get. Kibuishi does such a fantastic job of capturing the feeling of the scenes that he chose and I really hope his artwork can grab a different set of people than GrandPre’s (even if Harry probably doesn’t need the help pulling in an audience).

Anyway, this got me thinking of how publishers change cover designs. This often happens from hardcover to paperback, sometimes they just get reprints or anniversary editions, and, other times, the really bad times, they’ll change them in the middle of a series, leaving us with a miss-matched set of covers and a wounded soul.

Here are some of the wonderful, questionable, and minimal cover changes that have occurred in my world.

Holly Black’s Curse Workers got a redesign just before the third book came out. Even though we’d already seen the cover of the last one it was never printed. The new covers give a completely different feel. Admittedly, they took a little while to grow on me.

From this:

To this:

Stephanie Perkins' Anna and the French Kiss and it's companion novel Lola and the Boy Next Door were redone for Lola's paperback release. This means when the third novel comes out (tentatively spring 2014) the cover will match the new look of the first two. These also have a completely different look, but I can't lie, I really love them.

From this:

To this:

Sometimes cover changes happen from hardcover to paperback but aren't that major of changes. For example the softcover release of Maggie Stiefvater's The Raven Boys has the addition of a sketch of the Raven Boys themselves in the background. This one keeps the same feel as the original and might even tie in the cover of the second better.

Hardcover: 

 

Paperback:

Other times a cover goes through a progression. Maureen Johnson's The Name of the Star had one cover for hardcover, and then it looked like we might get the UK cover and then was printed with a completely different one in paperback. I'm glad we didn't get the UK one and the third is probably the best of three (even if it doesn't do justice to the creepy factor of the book) and is the one the cover of the second in the series matches.

Progression:

The really weird times though, are when books get completely repackaged, title and all. I am never 100% sure why this happens. I know it has something to do with marketing but to change even the title of a book always seems a little extreme.

Like Robin Wasserman's Skinned series which came out and looked like this:

Then a few years later they came out The Cold Awakening trilogy and looked like this:

The new covers are pretty cool all lined up like that but...what? I'm not even sure what to do with the complete revamp of the series. I hope more people picked it up. It does look a little more modern?

Anyway, I could be at this all day long (Sarah Rees Brennan's Unspoken cover! It was so pretty, so unique, why did you have to change it?!).

Some of the cover changes are really well done, some I even really love. But no matter how well done they are there's always a little part of me that rebels against changing the face of something I really like...even if it's for the better.

I think part of it changes how I sell the book and what sort of audience I think will be willing to pick it up. Look at the Curse Workers covers, especially the first one, they're so different and that's going to change how I go about recommending it.

But no matter what the covers look like it's the same text inside the book and they're all really fantastic reads. You should come in and check them out.

And seriously, I have another set of Harry Potter books to buy...

-Amy

The Bookshelves of Jo March, Neville Longbottom, Edmond Pevency, Claus and Fern Arable

This post was loosely inspired by a lovely post Natasha did a few weeks back about the hypothetical bookshelves of characters in literature. I was thinking about some of my favorite children's and young adult books and then I started thinking, "I wonder what some of my favorite characters like to read ..." And since they're fictional characters themselves, I've chosen to blithely ignore the fact that Jo March was 19th century and therefore couldn't have read Alan Bennett of the 20th/21st century.

Let's begin with Louisa May Alcott's beloved heroine. Jo March's bookshelf is easy because, in Little Women, she is perpetually reading. Her bookshelf, as detailed by Alcott in the novel, would look something like this:

Pilgrim's Progress, The Wide Wide World
Macbeth, and The Pickwick Papers

However, I think if Jo could time travel and read anything ever published, her bookshelf would look more like this:

13 Little Blue Envelopes, On Writing, The Penderwicks,
Self-Reliance and Other Essays, and The Uncommon Reader

Jo's a writer and grows up with a philosopher/minister father. She's also determined to travel, to escape her small world for a larger one, and ultimately to be a free woman.

I always thought J.K. Rowling's Neville Longbottom, underdog-turned-hero in the Harry Potter series, would have been an avid reader. As a kid who's bullied and bears the brunt of a lot of jokes, even from his friends, he seems the sort to enjoy some escapism. However, he also grows a lot over the course of the series, on a kind of epic saga of his own. Additionally, he's a horticulture-lover, so I think his bookshelf would look like this:

On The Road, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Edible Wild Plantsand Useful Herbs, 
Everything You Need to Know About Snakes, Spud

C.S. Lewis's Edmund Pevencie begins as the family rebel until the morality in the series beats it out of him. It does flare up on occasion, though, post Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and I think with that little bit of rebelliousness kicking around in his system, as well as his royal heritage in Narnia, his bookshelf would probably look something like this:

Tangerine, D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths,
King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table,
Edward III, The Hobbit

E.B. White's Fern Arable has an imagination and creative view of the world that, to me, screams "Reader!!" She's also an animal-lover and very child-like, while at the same time just beginning to approach the age where make believe isn't quite enough anymore. If Fern, like Jo, had run of a literary timeline, I think her bookshelf would look like this:

Because of Winn-Dixie; Are You There, God, It's Me, Margaret?;
Catwings; Mercy Watson to the Rescue; The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Who are some of your favorite book characters and what might their bookshelves look like?

accio audio

I can't imagine how I am ever going to follow up a blog post like Zoe's. (See below -- it is 1) epic and 2) ridiculous, much like the woman herself.) I think I probably have to resign myself to the fact that I'm just not as funny as Ms. Z, and you should probably resign yourself to that too. Of course, if you're reading in backwards chronological order, my post will come before Zoe's, and you will read my semi-nerdy post and maybe smile a tiny bit, and then you will read Zoe's magnum opus and in your gales of laughter you will fall out of your chair, or off of your couch, or out of your seat on the T. Oh well. So it goes.

--

Audiobooks are not really my thing, unless they're read by the author, who in my opinion is the only one who really knows how to read the writing. But I have one exception to this, and that is the brilliance that is Jim Dale reading the Harry Potter series.

Major nerd confession -- I listen to Harry Potter on audio every night as I fall asleep. I started about three years ago, when a certain person with whom I was sharing my sleeping space introduced me to the joys of Jim Dale, and I've never looked back. Of course, by now I've listened to all the books multiple times, and I have my favorite parts of each one. I don't go in chronological order; rather, I just pick what I'm in the mood for -- a Quidditch game? Action and adventure? Quiet times at the Burrow? (Man, I just nerded all over myself.) My default if I can't think of anything else is usually Chapter 22, Book 4, in which Harry asks Cho to the Yule Ball. He's so gawky and awkward and I can identify. (I asked out my date to the senior prom by passing him a note in precalculus. COME ON.)

So anyway, Jim Dale is pretty much a genius. His voices are absolutely perfect for the characters, and it's sometimes surprising to remember that it really is only one guy doing all the voices. Take his high-pitched, feathery Dolores Umbridge voice, for example, and compare it to his gravelly, rough Hagrid voice -- they sound nothing alike. But I suppose that's why Jim Dale's been winning Grammys for all of these albums, pretty much -- because they are absolute vocal brilliance. AND he's British, which earns him ten bonus points (at least in my book).

So the main side effect of having listened to Harry Potter on audio as I fall asleep every night for the past three-and-a-bit years is that I am the biggest Harry Potter trivia nerd ever. I mean ever. I can't recite passages, but you can ask me the tiniest detail about the most trivial scene, and I can tell you. It must be a subconscious thing, because I'm never really paying attention to the audio as I fall asleep.

I'm not really sure where this post is going...I suppose I should just conclude with a general recommendation of Harry Potter audiobooks, mostly because Jim Dale is an absolutely wonderful voice actor and I guarantee that if you like Harry Potter you will like the audiobooks. (And maybe you'll join in on the listening-to-Harry-at-night bandwagon -- let's start a trend, people!)