This box of paperbacks showed up at my house the other day:
I don’t have human children, but I imagine it would be a
shock to wake up one day and find that the face of your child had been
replaced. Her personality, her insides, her soul all remained the same, but outside,
she had a brand new look. It’d be pretty strange, right?
I suppose the comparison isn’t exactly the same, but getting
a new paperback cover---quite literally a new face in this case---for my novel, Hand Me Down, took some getting used to.
 |
| Hardcover |
I fell in love with my original hardcover image. It was the
first one the publisher presented to me, and my agent and editor and I all
loved it. And suddenly, it was like my book was real. This image was the first
face of my faceless word document, the first visual representation of my labor
of love, and very quickly, it was the image I pictured when I thought of my
book. Especially after I held a physical copy with its bound pages and felt the
thick matte texture of the jacket, the weight of it in my hands, it was hard to
imagine a new face for my baby. But I knew it was coming.
I hated the first proposed paperback design. It felt so
wrong for the book—pink and flowery and fluffy and so very, very wrong. Luckily my agent agreed and we
asked to see another design. For a while nothing came, and I grew even more
attached to the girls on my cover since we spent so much time on the road
together, but after a few months I got a new design. It didn’t grab me right
away, but I didn't hate it, and I was mulling over its pros and cons when another new design showed
up with a note that encouraged me to decide between these two covers relatively
quickly. I burst into tears. Neither
seemed right, neither seemed like it held a candle to the original cover, and I
wished we could just keep it. Why did my beautiful baby need a new look anyway?
She looked great the way she was.
I felt pressured by time, was emotionally and physically
drained from months of book tour traveling, and was so used to my hardcover
that I’m not sure anything would have looked good enough to me in that moment
and in that mind set, but my agent LOVED the last image. She thought it was
perfect, and even through my pouting I had the good sense to listen to her advice.
She said that this girl on the new cover was watching, just like Liz does, and
then I noticed the moon in her eye, the dusting of downy blonde hair at the
top, and I thought maybe my agent was right: that this could be the perfect
cover for the book’s new form. And boy, was she right.
 |
| Paperback |
I now think this close-up black and white face is a striking
image that also really represents Liz’s story. The colors pop and the composition makes
you want to pick it up and investigate. If Hand Me Down had to get a new face,
this a pretty good replacement. And it’s not like the other image will
disappear, at least not from my mind. It’s more like a caterpillar turning into
a butterfly, a metamorphosis, and the two images live
together in my head, both faces equally special.
The hardcover image really focused on two girls: Liz and
Jaime, the sisters in the book, who are definitely the core relationship of
the story. But I have to admit how much I like that in the long term, in the life
that she will live forever, Hand Me Down’s main image is a single girl, who is
tough but vulnerable, watching, cautious, but still with the moon in her eyes.
___________________________________________________________________________
Melanie Thorne is the author of Hand Me Down, a debut novel in the tradition of Dorothy Allison and
Janet Fitch. A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction
Book of 2012 and a 2013 YALSA Alex Award nominee, Hand Me Down has been widely praised by media, including the San Francisco Chronicle and Daily Candy,
and received a “compelling” 3.5/4 stars from People. Melanie earned her MA in Creative Writing from the University
of CA, Davis, where she was awarded the Alva Englund Fellowship and the Maurice
Prize in Fiction. She lives in Northern California.
Melanie, I love the candor of this post, and I think the analogy to the attachment a parent might have to the face of her child is pretty apt. (I've definitely had to get used to my human children's changing faces & bodies. I mean, they were just so incredibly perfect as babies, and now they're--well, they're teens, so--yeah. Still adorable, but changed.) Mostly, congrats on the paperback release -- I just put in an advance order with our local bookstore. Can't wait to get my copy!
ReplyDeleteThanks so much, Naomi!
DeleteI love both covers. Really. :)
ReplyDeleteI love cover page of the book. I hope story is also interesting. I am just interested to know about the story. I have to read the book to know all about the story. So now I am looking to download ebook of the novel so I can easily read full story of novel.
ReplyDelete