And the 2015 Newbery Award Goes To...

Introduction
Awards are popularity contests.  The Newbery Medal, given to the author whose book is considered to be the most distinguished in children’s literature out of a year’s worth of books aimed at young readers, is no different.  I have never been on an awards committee.  I have spoken to and taken classes from library professionals who have been on awards committees including the Newbery.  They all are in some level of agreement that the most passionate voice often holds sway.  This is not to say that book awards are without merit and that what goes on behind closed doors is not important.

If you look at the winners of the most prestigious award in American literature for young readers from the inception of award the Newbery Medal in 1922, it’s rather obvious that the books selected have not been chosen by children for children.  The list of winners is plagued by works that have gone out of print (or should have if not for the award designation), been loved by adults but not children, and are often difficult to sell to the target audience.

To say a revolution is afoot might be a false claim, but there does seem to be a sense of change coming, slow as it is.  In 2008 the committees were chastised for selecting books that are not universally loved by young readers or even read by them or the people who regularly work with children.  However, the 2009 selection of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book not only connected with adults but, surprisingly is enjoyed by the target audience and a rare genre (science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and so on) selection.   (Nonfiction as winner is just as rare in case we're counting.)

Realistic fiction is awards bait between the dead or absent parents, children having to face the harsh realities of life such as the death of a loved one including but not limited to pets and family members, being misfits, being on a book long guilt trip, and just suffering in general.  Orphans and dead pets in particular have long been overused to create drama and force a coming of age moment in realistic children’s fiction.  So, for a book that has some of the previously listed elements but was also about friendship and family in a nontraditional way and a happened paranormal variety fantasy to be given the highest distinction, it was a sign that the times might be a changing.  Or Neil Gaiman's just that brilliant and most librarians love him and he just plain deserved the award that year.

Not all the winners and honors since then have broken the mold.  There is still plenty of favoritism in play and authors who, as well written and accomplished as they are, seem to simply awarded for publishing something in a given year.  All it takes is one voice, one person with a deep seated passion for one book to push a book to medal winning status.  It should be noted that any number of honor books can be designated from none to infinity, though in a given year there has never been more than four, though there are some years where none have been selected.

Below are the 2015 selections for the Newbery Medal and honors including a brief description of each and what might be some of the reasons why they were selected.

Winner
Alexander, Kwame.  The Crossover.  Boston: HMH Books for Young Readers, 2014.

Someone suggested to me that this novel in verse was not a story but unconnected poetry about basketball.  That person obviously did not read this book correctly.  Alexander's medal deserving book is, actual, a strong narrative. Twelve year old Josh Bell discusses the highs and lows of his last basketball season through a variety of poems.  What the book does well is make you feel the game even if you are not familiar with it.  Josh also has to tackle some big changes including the different path he is taking from his twin brother Jordan who is more interested in girls than sports.

Alexander gets to the heart of what it's like to grow up without needing a plethora of words or resorting to cheap tricks.  There's an honesty to the book and Josh as a character that is relatable regardless of one's age or background.  That the poetry feels natural and each one leads nicely into the next without a break in flow makes The Crossover stand out even more.  It so easily could have been a device, but Alexander's ability to foreshadow deftly means you're eased into even the most emotional moments without feeling you've been cheated.  Truly a masterful work and an example of how to craft a poetic novel that kids will enjoy. 

Honor Books

Bell, Cece.  El Deafo.  New York: Amulet Books, 2014.

The most interesting aspect of this book's selection for a Newbery honor is that it is, in fact, a graphic novel.  The Newbery awards writing.  The Caldecott is awarded to illustrators for book illustrations.  I don't think Bell's book would be exactly high up the list for the illustration award, but I can say that the writing is quite strong.  El Deafo is the author's mostly autobiographical account of growing up with hearing loss.  As a result of a meningitis infection at the age of four, she lost most of her ability to hear.  The story is as much about fitting in as it is about the author finding her own self worth and not letting others opinions rule her life.  Bell's writing of her own story appears to be of a no nonsense simplicity, but it still hits home as a coming into one's self story, made up alter egos and all.  Young readers will love the format and relate to the story, hijinks and all. Adults will appreciate the bunny ears used throughout even characters without hearing loss.

Woodson, Jacqueline.  Brown Girl Dreaming.  New York: Nancy Paulsen Books, 2014.

Woodson discusses what it was like to grow up essentially in two worlds and of finding her calling to writing through free verse poems.  She writes about complex topics such as having to grow up and navigate the different ways of life in the south and in New York City.  Family, religion, politics, and location are all recurring topics.  Woodson is an excellent writer of free verse contemporary novels, but the inclusion of this book also feels a bit like an oft honored author getting another nod for doing something a little different.  It's a different sort of autobiographical effort and the message of following one's dreams and believing in something including oneself are important parts of the narrative and worth consideration even if adults undoubtedly will get more from this book than children. 


Conclusion
The 2015 Newbery selections have the feel of a diversity that has not always been present in the awarding in the past, but still have a sense of similarity between them.  Two books are written in verse, one is a graphic novel, two are by women, two by writers of color, one by are biographical in nature, one by a person with hearing loss.  None are traditional narratives.  This may be progress, but at the same time an oft honored but never winner is among the group.  One thing is clear, though.  The award and awarding of the Newbery Medal and its honors has changed since 1922.  The times truly are a changing and it is only right that the writer to whom the Newbery Medal is awarded reflects the times.  I, at least, can say that the winner, Kwame Alexander, is getting well deserved recognition for crafting a book I not only enjoyed experiencing but enjoy giving to young readers who feel the same after reading it.

And Now for Something Completely Different: Why YA Love Triangles Need to Go

The love triangle.  We've all read one or hundreds in our lives.  One character gets involved with another and then a third person shows up who is more interesting or cares more or is just more and the world will end if our main character does not anguish over who to choose.  Below are two examples of books I recently read that include the love triangle cliche.

Example 1
Book one is styled as a fantasy, derivative fairy tale meets bizarre but true history and a romantic subplot.  The main character, aka first person narrator, is a seventeen-year-old and unsurprisingly naive girl who is betrothed to the prince.  Their relationship can be called distanced but amicable despite not having seen each other or really spoken to each other in the two years since their betrothal.  No sparks fly between them but there is nothing to say they couldn't make it work.

In comes the foreigner to unravel everything and be love interest number two.  The narrator has led a sheltered life and knows little of the world, so, of course, our worldly introduction will be interesting to her.  However, she almost instantly goes along with what he says and bam!  She's 'in love' to quote her from several times in the book.  Here is someone who has had zero references in her life to what true love and being in love is like, but she knows she's in love with someone who is still basically a stranger.  Their chemistry on page is worse than the chilly relationship between the narrator and her betrothed.  Dramatics ensue in which her loyalties to both are tested for various reasons including 'doing the right thing' and 'saving the kingdom.'

Example 2
In book two, this time a 'realistic' fiction, the narrator main character (again, seventeen-ish and female) is torn between jock perfection who she knows gets around but doesn't really know other than he's the hottest thing in school and that guy blindly devoted to her since childhood who her friends think is weird and kind of a loser.  One insists he can help solve her problems and the other basically just wants to hookup or something.

Both of the example books are being released by big publishing houses this year.  One senses the continuing of a trend.  The trend being the love triangle that drives teen angst.  Here's why it needs a break or to just disappear for a while:

Totes cliche
Everyone is doing it!  All you need to think about are some of the most popular YA series.  It's difficult to find one that doesn't triangle at some point and a number of none genre one offs pull the same tricks to apparently make the story more interesting.  There are authors (John Green whom I don't heart but respect for not triangling his romances) of works for teens capable of crafting realistic teen works without resorting to: 

Forced melodrama
Consider the usual love triangle plot.  Now take out one of those characters (preferably the least believable or most unsuited to the main character).  Yes, it changes the story - sometimes a lot - but it also shows that there might be a more interesting plot that comes to the fore.  Example 1 is a case where the melodrama of the romantic triangle distracted from what was interesting about the book.  I almost missed the good bits at the end because I had to wade through unnecessary relationships.  The main reason for the drama factor?  This:

The relationships themselves are implausible
When I think of most real-life teenage relationships including my own, they don't usually involve someone being forced to constantly pledge allegiance to one person or another romantically over the course of a predetermined amount of time.  I don't think my experience in this is singular, either, which might explain why the love triangle is most present in implausible or genre (fantasy, science fiction) scenarios.  The audience is already tuned to world being different, so why not make expectations of relationships that way? 
This is really a fault of the forced 'do I love him or do I love him' aspect of these type of books.  The romantic interest characters in question (usually hims) are often diametrically opposed.  One's the good guy, the other bad, so you get a whole other cliche can of fish.  The main character (usually hers) is always put in a situation where she doesn't wish to choose one or the other but one of them handles the problem better and thus must be the victor.  Except:

Nobody really wins
The love triangle is a game of cat and mouse where they're all chasing each other for the prized cheese, no exceptions.  It's an angstfest to 'create interest' or 'flesh out the characters' or, as is most often the case, 'show the main character who she really is.'  There are enough coming of age tales available that don't need romantic interests to be relatable to the target audience much less the people who read them for fun outside the target. 
In the end, the main character has always been through the emotional wringer, the love interests usually have gotten into a brawl with each other (sometimes fatally so), and none of them are truly happy despite the pretext that it can end happily ever after even in realistic fiction.  Katniss is a good example of being torn between loyalties and ending up content but not truly happy as well as being a victim of forced triangulation to intensify drama. 

Now, I'm not saying I expect the publishers and authors to completely do away with the triangle or even the rare love square.  They can be done well, but the problem lies in everything I just said above and some ideas I didn't even touch on.  Ideally the romantic interest, one singular interest, would have qualities of both the usual bad and good boys that bring out the best in the main character.  I scoff at the idea that a plausible relationship between two attracted characters can't be interesting without introducing a third (John Green, again, does this well even though I still don't particularly care for his books.)  Yes, the triangles sell and create marketing opportunities.  Yes, it is easier to say you're team whatevs versus team whatnots.  But just because those things are good for selling doesn't mean they're good to read all the time.  So, for a change now and then, let's try something completely different and not force love triangles into all our book.  I suspect the results will be much more interesting and certainly something different.

Let's Not Get Lost

Title: Let’s Get Lost
Author: Adi Alsaid
Publication Date: 29 July 2014

Note: ARC received via Amazon Vine program

Let’s Get Lost by Adi Alsaid is the story of Leila as told through her brief encounters with four strangers while she is on a road trip of discovery.  Because of the limited nature of these encounters, we only see glimpses of who Leila and her acquaintances really are.  Alsaid’s writing is crisp and somewhat refreshing in its flowing nature and ability to not overcook the descriptors.  You get enough of a picture of the scene to feel like you're there with the characters.  Where the book falls short is the scenarios presented and the way in which the main characters go along with Leila's sudden presence in their lives. 

The first section in which Leila meets mechanic Hudson and they start his journey of discovery feels the most realistically possible, but the following scenarios grow in absurdity.  Runaway Bree encourages Leila to steal and they get tossed in jail for borrowing a sports car which they intend to return.  Elliot nearly gets run over by Leila and then immediately trusts her to help him try to win the girl of his dreams on prom night.  Sonia loses her passport and they need a stoner to smuggle them across the US-Canada border.  In Leila’s final moments of self-discovery, a group of total strangers go along with a little girl's desire to throw Leila a birthday party, but, of course, that all goes wrong, too.

I must admit I felt little to no connection to Leila at the start as she seemed that sage stranger who seems to really be present to guide the other characters through a difficult period of their lives.  The timing is all a bit too perfect and the strangers all too trusting, especially the peripheral characters who really should know better.  By the end you'll find out why Leila is the way she is, a moment that wouldn't make sense earlier but feels like it should have found a way in anyway.  Don't misread that as saying the book isn't without merit.  Alsaid has talent and is an author to keep an eye out for in the future.  Let’s Get Lost is the type of book you can tear through in an afternoon sitting.  The writing itself has something indescribable that pushes you along and makes you care enough to get through to the end.  The characters and scenarios, though, don’t quite have the same spark and make the journey less fun than it ought to be.

"I Can't Read!"

Among the many Monty Python sketches (though it's been used other places, memorably with Marty Feldman in the Graham Chapman Role) that I feel get forgotten is this gem – The Bookshop Sketch.  Yes, I know it is a bit of a risk to use the punchline for the title of the post as if it might give something away, but the whole sketch contains a large kernel of truth as to not only how we relate to books, but how different we all can be in relating to them. It also got me thinking about my own reading process and how I relate to the books I read.  

Slightly different version to get a sense of the sketch:




I recently undertook the task of attempting to read two books as objectively as I could manage.  The first book was one I went into with the expectation of extreme displeasure and near dread; the other gave me a sense of sheer joy just to hold it and expected to love it.  Instead of allowing those feelings to drive the experience of reading each book, though, I tried to experience them with a bit of distance.  The results of the experiment is, well, not entirely surprising.

Pure objectivity is impossible.  We all bring bias into our reading, which is why my results are not wholly surprising.  There are schools of criticism which attempt to remove the reader completely from the process and plenty that bring the reader to the center of the reading process, but neither is what I was aiming for.  I was not reading with an eye to a specific criticism but rather an eye toward not letting my predisposition toward each book completely influence my reading of them.

By not focusing entirely on the parts I loved or hated, I found that each book had problems, one more than the other in my opinion, but the point of the exercise was not about comparison either.  Rather, the exercise was about the experience of being as neutral in my approach to reading each book.  Had I allowed myself to be blinded in the process, driven by whatever expectation I had coming into each, I would have been like the bookseller in the sketch – making assumptions about what the customer.  In fact, the reasons I downgraded or upgraded my assessment of each book were for somewhat unexpected purposes that could best be classified as quirks of each author's writing style.  In the case of book I wanted to hate, I found there were redeeming qualities in characterization from time to time.  Likewise, book I wanted to love required me to get past an overhyped sense of drama in order to be completely in love with it.  I was able to focus on the clever turns of phrases, depth of characterization, and leaps of logic or suspense that worked and didn’t work in each book and came out a bit more, well, neutral.  I wasn't so neutral as to completely change my assessment of either book completely, however.

So, about that sketch.  I’ve always connected to Bookshop Sketch because of the growing absurdity of the customer’s requests and the fact that John Cleese so brilliantly plays the quick to anger bookseller.  What I didn’t quite connect to until I looked at it from the angle of a reference librarian was the fact that it truly is about the customer’s inability to read.  The level of innocence, despite the customer’s occasional use of big words and referenced literary classics, is something that we lose over time because of our reading experiences which is why objective reading, after a time, is near impossible.  It’s a convoluted mess, as difficult as finding '‘Stickwick Stapers’ by Farles Wickens with four M’s and a silent Q' one might even suggest. If we’re reading with an eye to understand a book and not automatically disparage it for whatever reason, well, we might just find a lot more to like.

Woman as Object in Sergei Lukyanenko's The Genome

Title: The Genome
Author: Sergei Lukyanenko
Publication Date: 12 December 2014

Note: ARC received via Amazon Vine program

*Warning: Contains potential spoilers throughout*

Sergei Lukyanenko’s The Genome is classified as science fiction and probably best considered under the speculative fiction label.  The story of Alex, who finds himself the captain of a spaceship that takes non-human species on tours and on which everyone seems to have a secret, is told largely through dialogue.  This type of writing should provide the author the ability to make each character unique and make them sound like rounded people.  Instead, the dialogue often reinforces the one dimensionality of the characters by not allowing us, the readers, to observe their actions.  The lack of dimensionality may be due, at least in part, to the fact that the majority of the characters are speshes.  That is, people who have been genetically altered for certain tasks.  Alex, the main character, is a pilot spesh whose main abilities are described as piloting space craft and keeping the occupants of the craft safe.  He is, we are told, incapable of love as a result of these specializations.

Lukyanenko’s book has a problem with all the characters, but women in particular.  Of the two females that play the largest part in the narrative, neither manages to rise above the need for a man or escape Alex’s need for occasional sexual gratification.  To be fair, even the male characters in the book are fairly one-dimensional and no one outside of Alex seems present other than to help Alex’s emotional journey get from point A to point B.  However, portrayal of two of the women is particularly problematic considering they have the most specializations of anyone in the novel.

First, let us consider the doctor and stereotypical large black woman, Janet.  Yes, that is how the book describes her when her physical appearance actually comes up.  Despite her various specializations (she is part of Alex’s crew for her capabilities as a doctor but lists four others), Janet’s main problem is that she apparently needs a man by the end of the book.  When we first meet her she is a bit opinionated and may be trouble in the event of non-human species coming aboard the ship because of her past role as an executioner-spesh.  She even assists Alex with a dilemma in her role as doctor early on, but sometime after having sex with Alex that role is no longer of consequence. 

The penultimate sequence in which we learn anything about Janet illustrates the dilemma of her going from being a doctor and having opinions and struggling with her ingrained dislike of non-humans to her apparent need for male affection.  Alex, as peeping tom, watches her attempt to seduce the now confused homosexual character Puck.  The author makes a point that she is completely naked while Puck is only half so.  The scene is meant to show that Alex’s emotional abilities have changed from the beginning of the book and that he moving beyond just having sex for gratification.  However, even he thinks of her as a sexual object, something to be observed and desired for her body instead of her spesh abilities.  If her early role was to be a co-conspirator, her later role is that of satisfying a man’s desires even if he does not know what those are.

This brings us to Kim, a fourteen-year-old nymphet.  While the opening chapter is one of the best and introduces Alex to Kim and both to us readers, it, too, is not without challenges when taken in context of the whole book.  Age withstanding, Alex is thrown immediately into caring for her when he realizes she has yet to undergo the spesh equivalent of puberty (which is described in terms of a caterpillar’s changing into a butterfly in one night) to the point that she is naked and he is clothed in a non-erotic sense.  It is intriguing to note that the author makes a point of Kim’s changes being internal and mental compared to physical so that her outward appearance to Alex is basically the same before and after the metamorphosis.  However, with those mental shifts comes the problem of her imprinting on him.  Kim not only wants Alex’s love but needs it and not just in the mental sense.

Muddling the waters, of course, is the fact Kim is only fourteen.  Even if she were four years older, thus making the pairing more appropriate, Kim’s role is still to push Alex into a situation where he wants to be capable of loving another regardless of physical attraction.  He wants to see her as more than something to have sex with.  As soon as he sleeps with her (and the same holds true with Janet to a degree), Kim’s initial defining characteristics take a back seat to her pre-described function in Alex’s life.  Kim’s dialogue in relation to her need for Alex is uncomfortably misogynistic.  Kim seems to look to him for love and acceptance in order to be a person herself.  To make matters worse, we find out that she’s essentially been programmed this way by another character who claims he can help Alex find that feeling he longs for.  The argument then becomes something akin to woman not only needing a man to survive but that they have no purpose in life without men filling a void and telling them they need to be a certain way.

If you’re looking at The Genome and thinking it’s going to be thought provoking and speculative from the item description, I’m telling you it’s not.  The writing never sits on an idea and explores it instead opting for a musical chairs approach and hope you win the cake in the end.  The book reads like a morality tale more than science fiction.  In fact, the science part is mostly connected to the genetic alteration that makes speshes and the very brief space travel that occurs.  This is truly more the speculative variety, but not good.

Thematically, Sergei Lukyanenko inserts some talking points, but the lack of exploration and explanation are obvious the further in you go.  Things just are the way they are more often than not.  Characters, too. If there is anything to be gained from the book it’s the talk of how genetic alteration is not without risk.  However, even that theme gets mired in the muck of people being treated solely as.  Were the men treated more equally in tone, I might not feel so negatively toward the book.  There is an obvious difference, too, when you look at Puck in particular.  Alex mostly ignores the fact that Puck is not only homosexual but a natural (i.e. not genetically enhanced).  Yet Alex actively pursues sexual encounters with women he knows he cannot possibly have a mental romantic attachment to.  That the detachment is chalked up to genetics just cheapens the relationships and encourages the male dominant narrative of men treating women as objects rather than fellow humans, which is odd because the book seems to be saying something about acceptance of all sorts of people and their beliefs.

I cannot, in good conscience, recommend this book.  It’s sad to think that, even in the future, women would just be objects for male gratification.  Genetically altered but still just objects.  This type of thinking does not good storytelling (scientific, fantastical or otherwise) make.

Fish Slapping: Goodreads, Cover Art, and Upvoting

I’m guessing that most readers, myself included, think about books in terms related to the writing: story or plot, character, setting, themes and the like.  But what about the physical book, the package you see in the store or when looking online – which draws you to one book over another?  Title, author, and cover art come to mind, not necessarily in that order.

In an age of internet sales driving the book business, cover art has become all the more important and obvious.  Outside of an author’s name being attached to a book, attractive covers have the ability to draw in readers and sell them content they may not otherwise even notice.  One look at reviews on Goodreads in particular is all the proof needed.  A search also shows how Cover Love is alive and well:

That’s a lot of lists just focusing on book cover art.  Depending on how you phrase the query, you can get even more results or less depending on the specificity of your search.  Still, 200+ focusing on something that’s often easily detached or even forgotten about once a book is opened is worth taking a closer look at.

Consider these two screenshots of reviews from Goodreads for two books that could be classified as Young Adult and Fantasy or Science Fiction.  First, a sample of reviews from the last of a NYT bestselling YA series:

Now a sample of reviews for a newly released YA trilogy starter:

In terms of helpfulness, the majority of the above reviews tell you little to nothing of the contents of the book relating to story (which would be the author’s territory) but they do tell you all about how incredible the book looks (the cover artist/design team’s territory).  As nice as this is, there are a few issues that arise from such “reviews.”

1.    Upvoting – if you’re a publisher or author or anyone involved with the book, you’re hoping the numbers are good because people are more likely to buy something that other people like.  Seeing a lot of 5 star reviews can generate extra sales, but a closer look may show that the upvotes are actually related to the cover, not the writing.  While I have nothing against the practice of reviewing a book by its cover (we all do this every time we pick one book over another either online or in store when just browsing as opposed to when we are looking for a specific book), rating a book by its cover is a different story. 

Rating 5 stars and saying “Squee, best cover ever!” is obnoxious and unhelpful for someone looking for an honest review of book content.  “Totes unique and original” is only mildly more helpful, but sometimes still questionable as to whether it refers to cover or content when the date of the review is before the date of book publication or even after pub date.  I often agree that a cover is “squee” worthy when I’m looking at certain genres (Young Adult reviews are often plagued by these reviews), but I’m not reading reviews to know what people think of the cover that I know looks amazing.  I want to know why a 5 star rating was deserved for the author’s work or why someone else thought it was worthy of a 1 or anywhere in between.  I have never ever seen a 3 star review that says “This cover was okay, but lacked that certain je ne sais quoi to make it worthy of an extra star or two.”  That’s the type of review you get for the writing, not the art.  Hence, the cover “reviews” with ratings actually upvote the content and do not reflect an accurately helpful rating of the product.

2.    Increased Pre-release Fan girl/boy activity: This is something you actually want if you’re an author trying to sell a book, especially if you’re getting your first book published or your first in a specific genre or your first in a long time.  A solid cover that catches the eye can help drive sales instead of people just saying they’ll wait until they can get it from the library.  I don’t have numbers, but from experience talking to people and my own purchasing habits, people are more likely to buy attractively packaged products more than those that look shabby or not worth purchasing.  This also helps explain why certain series get re releases with new covers from time to time.  I have to admit that I seriously considered purchasing the Harry Potter hardcover set featuring Kazu Kibuishi’s cover art because it looked cool, I love the artist, and I only have a measly paperback set, but I didn’t need another set so I’ve held off.

But what the cover art does in the case of a lot of high profile series is stir up the fan boy and fan girl rather than the public.  I’m guessing that my Harry Potter example is something that some people are rolling their eyes at.  It’s not for everyone.  In actuality, the first of the screen caps shows this, a high profile series with great art to the fan of the series causes the upvoting phenomenon on an even bigger scale.  Since they are already a fan, the assumption is that the book is going to be “OMG, Amazing!” regardless of the content.  That’s not true, but you’ll have to dig to find the fans who hated the book(s) and give us wheat reviews because of all the chaff reviews that amount to “So PRETTY!  I NEEDZ, HAZ 2 HAZ.”

3.    Material Misrepresentation: I call this the cover that has details that are not in the book or the cover that has little to no real connection to the writing.  While authors may ask the publisher to include something in the cover art or have the artist represent a particular scene or sequence, the truth is that most cover art is created separately from the author’s work and intent.  Most authors will tell you that they get little if any say in what the cover of their book looks like.   Graphic novels and picture books are often the exception but that’s due to the artist being directly tied to book content.  Even so, the content of the book and the content of the cover do not always match up and can cause confusion and even anger amongst fans.

Scrutiny is a big thing when it comes to cover art.  The bigger the series or the author, the more likely the cover is going to be looked at with the finest tooth comb.  Sometimes something is included or hinted at on the cover that actually has nothing to do with the book or lead fans to believe one thing only to discover the writing tells a very different story.  A well-known example of the cover not matching the story is the U.S. cover of Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief.   The cover features a finger knocking over some dominoes and does not reflect the fact the book is about a young girl's life in Nazi Germany as observed and narrated by Death.   While covers not matching stories is less a problem than it used to be when the writing and packaging of a book were completely separate, it still happens from time to time with the result that someone, somewhere, is vastly disappointed to the point that a product is unfairly dissed.

4.    Incorrect Source Attribution: Let’s give the proper person credit where credit is due.  If you’re talking about the cover, please (x3) mention the artist or design team responsible.  Saying the cover is the author’s own work (unless it obviously is) is a vastly incorrect source attribution.  We all like to have our good work noted.  The cover artists deserve as much credit as they can get for a job well done, especially if it’s going to drive sales for a product.  Most jacket covers give artists and designers credit on the back flap, so saying that they’re not listed or easy to find simply isn’t true these days.  Most good ones can even be found online with a minimal amount of searching.

If you’re still with me, this has all been a long winded attempt to explain why good book cover art matters and why acknowledging the artists is important.  As reviewers, we need to give the artists their dues for the beauty they bring to books.  We need to acknowledge that their artwork can create a frenzy and generate sales.  It’s okay to recognize the art as much as the writing, but also to recognize that they are not reflective of each other.  A book with beautiful art may not be as beautifully written.  The reverse can be equally true and that's okay.

I’m all for giving a shout out for beautiful covers.  What I’m *not* for is the upvoting and reviews from the fan girl/boy that focus solely on how a book looks.  A book is more than art.  A book, the physical variety anyway, is a package deal.  It is the harmony of font, typesetting, binding, jacket cover and art with the characters, setting, and plot present in the writing.  It’s not just the author or the cover artists that sell good books.  It’s the design teams at the publishing houses that give us covers to drool over, titles to obsess about, and books we want to share with everyone.

Go ahead and drool, you know you want to.  Just attribute correctly, or I’m gonna have to resort to some fish slapping a la Monty Python.