Promises,
Promises: Judging a Book by Its Cover
By April Lindner
We’ve all been told that you can’t judge a book by its
cover. And yet some of us book lovers can’t help ourselves; there’s nothing
like a gorgeous cover to lure us in. More often than not, an enticing cover is
the main thing that moves me to pick up a book I’ve never heard of, to start
paging through it, giving the first few paragraphs a chance to seal the deal—or
not.
So for me the most exciting moment in the whole bookmaking
occurs when a book’s future cover appears in my inbox. I click on the
thumbnail, and wait breathlessly as the image blooms onto my computer screen.
Only then can I imagine my manuscript as a book—on a shelf, or, better still,
in the hands of a reader. I know the cover will set the book’s tone. And it
will make promises—hopefully the right ones.
All of this explains why I’m so thrilled by the new
cover of Catherine’s paperback edition, due out in August. Don’t get me wrong:
I love the original Catherine cover. Lush and dramatic, it makes certain
promises—ones I believe the book keeps. The elegant model in her kickass stance
promises a strong female protagonist. (Actually, the book has two alternating
strong female narrators—Catherine and her daughter Chelsea.) And the
background, with the iconic Flatiron Building rising up through the mist,
promises the book’s Lower Manhattan setting will be as important as its
characters. The title typeface—bold and purple—promises a confident,
free-spirited heroine—exactly how I see Catherine herself.
But the new paperback cover—already available to readers
who download the Ebook-- makes a different set of promises. On it, a boy and a
girl hold each other in the shadows of a graffiti-covered underpass. They gaze
at each other in rapt wonder, their shoulders, neck and heads echoing the shape
of a heart. Secret romance, this cover says. It promises love against the odds.
The scene is gritty—less glamorous than the cityscape on the original—but this
grittiness befits the book’s main setting, a post punk night club on the
Bowery. The title’s typeface is still bold, but its peachy color underscores
the sweet and optimistic innocence of this couple’s embrace.
Inspired by the classic romance Wuthering Heights,
Catherine is a story of star-crossed love interwoven with mystery. Its
soundtrack is the post-punk music played by Catherine’s boyfriend, Hence. And
the new paperback cover captures that complex mood exactly, I think. In fact,
when it popped up on my computer screen for the first time, I almost swooned.
There it was, in front of me: almost exactly the picture I saw in my
imagination as I wrote the book.
An author can hope for nothing more than that.
{About
the book}
Catherine by
April Lindner
Release
Date: January 1, 2013 |
August 19, 2014 (paperback)
Publisher: Poppy
Formats:
Hardcover, Paperback, ebook
Pages: 320
Genre:
Young Adult – Contemporary Romance, Retelling
Buy it: Amazon | The Book Depository
Add
it: Goodreads
A
forbidden romance. A modern mystery. Wuthering Heights as you’ve never seen it
before.
Catherine
is tired of struggling musicians befriending her just so they can get a gig at
her Dad’s famous Manhattan club, The Underground. Then she meets mysterious
Hence, an unbelievably passionate and talented musician on the brink of
success. As their relationship grows, both are swept away in a fiery romance.
But when their love is tested by a cruel whim of fate, will pride keep them
apart?
Chelsea
has always believed that her mom died of a sudden illness, until she finds a
letter her dad has kept from her for years—a letter from her mom, Catherine,
who didn’t die: She disappeared. Driven by unanswered questions, Chelsea sets
out to look for her—starting with the return address on the letter: The
Underground.
Told in
two voices, twenty years apart, Catherine interweaves a timeless forbidden
romance with a compelling modern mystery.
{About April Lindner}
April Lindner is the author of three novels: Catherine, a
modernization of Wuthering Heights; Jane, an update of Jane Eyre; and Love,
Lucy, due out in January, 2015. She also has published two poetry collections,
Skin and This Bed Our Bodies Shaped. She plays acoustic guitar badly, sees more
rock concerts than she’d care to admit, travels whenever she can, cooks Italian
food, and lavishes attention on her pets—two Labrador retriever mixes and two
excitable guinea pigs. A professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University,
April lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and two sons.
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