Wondrous Covers Wednesday is a weekly feature where I usually choose to showcase at least three covers with similar attributes and themes. This series will be branching out a little. To see past editions, you can check out my page for them here.
Your eyes are not deceiving you, I am in fact doing a Wondrous Covers Wednesday post! I miss these posts so much. I have been tracking covers a ton since the New Year hit and I’ve noticed there are so many amazing animated ones. I love this trend, though by the count of this post, it’s past trend stage and here to stay!
Originally, I was going to make a super-mega long post with a ton of covers but that would have been a lot, even for me. Instead, I am breaking this into a series! Because apparently I’m just all about the series posts these days. There will be days when the covers may overlap because of the theme but that’s okay! They should be looked at more than once.
Today’s theme is all about interesting animation having to do with faces. I supposed there’s some mixed media involved with some of these covers. These first ones aren’t all fully animated but have some form of animated aspect. Let me say now that I am so in love with these gorgeous looking books.
I’m also trying out a new format here so hopefully you like it.
Tiger’s Not Daughters (Tiger’s Not Daughters #1) by Samantha Mabry:
The Torres sisters dream of escape. Escape from their needy and despotic widowed father, and from their San Antonio neighborhood, full of old San Antonio families and all the traditions and expectations that go along with them. In the summer after her senior year of high school, Ana, the oldest sister, falls to her death from her bedroom window. A year later, her three younger sisters, Jessica, Iridian, and Rosa, are still consumed by grief and haunted by their sister’s memory. Their dream of leaving Southtown now seems out of reach. But then strange things start happening around the house: mysterious laughter, mysterious shadows, mysterious writing on the walls. The sisters begin to wonder if Ana really is haunting them, trying to send them a message—and what exactly she’s trying to say.
In a stunning follow-up to her National Book Award–longlisted novel All the Wind in the World, Samantha Mabry weaves an aching, magical novel that is one part family drama, one part ghost story, and one part love story.
~My Thoughts~
I seriously love The Tiger’s Daughter cover, it is so gorgeous. The colors are amazing. The touch of the tiger kind of has me in awe even if it may be a common sense thing to add due to the title. I feel the way it’s shown is genius and I love how it affects the model’s face. I love how they faded out the model to black and white and used colors on top of them. Especially given the ghost aspect. The font is really pretty as well, I love the color too.
Hollow by Rhonda Parrish:
A car accident shattered sixteen-year-old Morgan’s family. Now her brother’s dead, her mom’s paralyzed in more ways than one, her dad lives at work and her seven-year-old sister Amy tries too freaking hard to salvage everything. What’s more, high school is its own special kind of hell, where her ex-boyfriend delights in spreading rumors that shred her reputation and make her feel like a loser.
When she finds an old camera in a creepy abandoned hospital, it seems like her luck is finally changing. And it is changing–from bad to worse. Because of course it is. Each time Morgan photographs one of her classmates they become corrupted versions of themselves. It’s like the camera steals their goodness, their essence, and leaves them hollow.
Then her sister uses the camera to take a selfie.
No matter what the cost, Morgan will find a way to reverse the effects of the cursed camera and save Amy, before her already-fractured family completely self-destructs
~My Thoughts~
This cover can seem a bit plain to some, but the details are intriguing to me like what looks like moths to me. It is definitely haunting. I like the bird being made up of the model’s face. The expression the model has seems haunting which fits the description well. From a metaphorical point of view, I like how the bird can represent the freedom that Morgan has to help give Amy. Speaking of Amy, I’m getting the creeps just thinking about a seven year old turning into some demonized version. Rosemary’s child, anyone?
The Year After You by Nina De Pass
San Francisco. New Year’s Eve. A tragic accident after the party of the year. Cara survives. Her best friend, G, doesn’t.
Nine months later, Cara is still struggling, consumed by guilt and grief. In the hopes of giving Cara a fresh start, her mother sends her to boarding school in Switzerland, a place where no one knows what happened–and where they never will, if Cara can help it.
But her new classmates Ren and Hector won’t let her close herself off. They are determined to break down the walls she has so carefully built up. And maybe Cara wants them to . . . especially Hector, who seems to understand her like no one else does.
The problem is that the closer Cara gets to Hector, the more G slips away. If moving on means letting go of the past–and admitting what she did that night–Cara’s not sure she can.
She’s not sure she deserves a second chance.
~My Thoughts~
Once again we have the model here being drawn out aside from the face and part of her body. I can really sense the model’s despair just by the side view that we’re given. On a metaphorical sense, I view the lack of a fully animated model and plant as Cara growing and getting stronger through the book. The broken title font gives me the sense of something being missing as well.
How To Build A Heart by Maria Padian
One young woman’s journey to find her place in the world as the carefully separated strands of her life — family, money, school, and love — begin to overlap and tangle.
All sixteen-year-old Izzy Crawford wants is to feel like she really belongs somewhere. Her father, a marine, died in Iraq six years ago, and Izzy’s moved to a new town nearly every year since, far from the help of her extended family in North Carolina and Puerto Rico. When Izzy’s hardworking mom moves their small family to Virginia, all her dreams start clicking into place. She likes her new school—even if Izzy is careful to keep her scholarship-student status hidden from her well-to-do classmates and her new athletic and popular boyfriend. And best of all: Izzy’s family has been selected by Habitat for Humanity to build and move into a brand-new house. Izzy is this close to the community and permanence she’s been searching for, until all the secret pieces of her life begin to collide.
How to Build a Heart is the story of Izzy’s journey to find her place in the world and her discovery that the choices we make and the people we love ultimately define us and bring us home.
~My Thoughts~
Once again, I love how well the emotional distress comes across through the illustrations. I’m such a big fan of drawn or sketched look of models. For the cover of How To Build A Heart, we have the whole model colorless aside from the heart. Speaking of the heart, it is so gorgeous how it’s made up if different colors. I love the look of it over the cover model. The font could easily be distracting between the sketch, heart and blending of colors but it works really well.
Shadowshaper Legacy (#3) by Daniel Jose Older
The epic conclusion to the acclaimed Shadowshaper Cypher series!
A house divided
Sierra and the shadowshapers have been split apart. Juan, Anthony, and Izzy are in jail, anxiously waiting to find out what will become of them. Back in Brooklyn, the other shadowshapers have been getting threatening messages from whisper wraiths, catching strangely shaped figures stalking them, and fending off random spirits. A war is brewing among the houses, and the very magic of the shadowshapers is at stake.
The fate of the worlds
Sierra is determined to protect her own in the coming conflict. Even if that means keeping secrets from them. But a deal with Death by one of Sierra’s ancestors has far-reaching consequences in the battles of the present, and as old fates tangle with new powers, Sierra will have to harness the Deck of Worlds and confront her family’s past if she has any hope of saving the future and everyone she loves. Only doing so will mean following the magic to places the shadowshapers have never gone before . . . and may never return from.
~My Thoughts~
Last but not least:
The covers for the Shadowshaper series have always been gorgeous and Shadowshaper Legacy is no exception. This is a book I would pick up based on the cover alone. It looks so eye-catching. The model is gorgeous. I love colors this has. The font is simple but just seems so “professional”, if that makes any kind of sense. It reminds me of Adult novels which sounds like a weird thing to say. The combination of everything just works so well.
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