Harper Collins, Part Two

Well Table #3 hadn’t quite gotten into the swing of it yet, so we didn’t get to everything.  Some of the things we did see were beautiful and familiar though.  Mary McCarthy’s A Closer Look is definitely making a play for the Steve Jenkins/An Egg Is Quiet crowd.  It was fun to see the original teeny tiny version that came via an unsolicited manuscript.  Plus the book is making a mad dash for the year’s Best Endpapers of the Year Award.  It’s hard to beat hummingbird feather endpapers.  I’m just saying.

Love former Newbery winner Criss Cross or hate it, it’s hard to deny that the original cover did the story no favors.  Greenwillow obviously got the hint on this one and has indulged us with a new paperback image.  Unfortunately, it’s not available online yet (it’s coming out in stories January 2008) so I can’t show it to you.  Basically it shows a photograph of Debbie lying on her back in a field with a large tree growing behind her.  It does kind of look like the tree is emerging from her stomach, which I can only assume was done on purpose.  This image is yet another fine candidate in the Girls Lying on Grass covers we’ve seen such a spate of in the last few years.  It joins the ranks of such fellow paperbacks Shug, The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place, and The Secret Language of Girls.  Ms. Duncan also showed us a rejected cover of complete and utter beauty.  Sadly, the author didn’t care for it so we’ll be looking at tree tummy girl from here on in.  I had hoped that maybe Lynne Rae Perkins would have linked to the new cover from her website but nothing as of yet.

Not to be outdone by Random House’s terminal disease title Before I Die by Jenny Downham, it’s bringing out it’s own soon-to-be-dead teen novel Deadline by Chris Crutcher.  Apparently Lurleen McDaniel had the right idea all along.  And I was a fan of the premise behind Don’t Call Me Ishmael by Michael Gerard Bauer.  So much so, in fact, that I took a copy of the book even though it is clearly a teen title.  We’ll see how well the American cover does.  As such it sports a vague whale looking thing with a screw coming out of it and the words "Ahoy Sucker!" grafittied on the side.  This would be fine except that A) Every person I’ve shown this to thinks that the name of the book is "Ahoy Sucker!" and B) The original Australian cover looked like this:

Ringo pens?  How could they not redo the magic of the Ringo pen?

Also, the book Cherry Heaven by L.J. Adlington was a cool sounding sci-fi Utopian society tale.  How sad is it that that was all they had to say to get my interest?  *sigh*  Don’t know what it’ll look like in the U.S. but here’s the British cover, all covered in cute little skull-shaped cherries.

DING!

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