Wednesday, December 31, 2014
The Books of 2014: Covers
There were some very good and some very terrible covers this year.
First, The Bad
I’ve already ranted about how much I hated the cover for Burn for Me:
It’s awful. And there was an alternate that was gorgeous, which is just adding insult to injury.
For the other book, I hate to do this, because it’s not a horrible cover, but she’s had such gorgeous covers in the past, I found the cover of Why Kings Confess to be terribly disappointing.
It doesn’t look at all like Sebastian, and there is nothing in the cover that draws me in. But the fact that previous covers were so gorgeous, I have a much higher bar for this series than I do for many others.
Now, The Good
Luckily, there were far more covers I really liked this year.
I really loved the cover of Jaye Wells Dirty Magic:
ML Brennan’s Generation V series also has good covers:
But as the main character is male, that’s not particularly unusual. But they do a good job getting Fort right.
Faith Hunter, as usual, gets fabulous covers for her Jane Yellowrock books.
I adore how powerful Jane is.
As always, kudos to the latest Cal Leandros book
That all the covers do such an excellent job of portraying the essence of Cal (and Niko when he makes an appearance) continues to astound me. Every cover in the series is immediately recognizable as a Cal & Niko book, and Cal looks exactly how he is written: like an obnoxious asshole with an obsession with guns.
And I want to draw special attention to Fairest Vol. 3: The Return of the Maharaja
The book had FANTASTIC art.
With caveats, Patricia Briggs also gets good covers.
For some reason they always have Mercy showing more skin than seems at all realistic for her character. But she is shown as strong and acting (as opposed to being acted upon) so I’ll take what I can get.