Feature and Follow Friday #11

Feature & Follow Friday is a weekly social blog hop between book bloggers. There are two regular hosts: Parajunkee and Alison of Alison Can Read, and two special guest hosts every week. If you want to join in, click on either of their blogs to get the details. The FF question of the day is:

Q: Have you ever looked at book’s cover and thought, This is going to horrible? But, was instead pleasantly surprised? Show us the cover and tell us about the book.

While I generally am far too influenced by book covers to pick up a book that doesn't appeal visually, I've had different reactions to two different covers of the same book.  Although I started with the cover that appealed, it's fascinating to look at the less attractive cover and measure my reaction against the actual book.

Brenna Yovanoff's THE REPLACEMENT is the perfect example of a book which shaped my expectations entirely because of its cover. I did not encounter the U.K. version, at right, until after I read it, but if I had, I would never have read the novel. It's horribly cheesy, and somehow reminiscent of the not soapy enough to be interesting TV adaptation of L.J. Smith's THE SECRET CIRCLE.

On the left is the U.S. cover that led me to buy this book off the bookshelf store, without having read any reviews or even having heard of the book at all. I love this cover, and was confident that the book would be frightening and original.  

The interesting thing about the two covers is that if I had to judge the book by its cover, it's actually somewhere in between the two. It's not as bad as its U.K. version, but it doesn't fulfill the promise of its U.S. version. 

Without resorting to the familiar cliche, I like the idea of reviewing a book by its different covers. Everyone has a different aesthetic sense, but I believe that there's a lot more commonality between what we can immediately judge as appealing or not in a book cover  than there is in reading a review. Since a review is always a reflection of the reviewer as much as the work, judging a book by multiple covers is almost an easier way to gauge whether a book will align with your individual taste. 

If only every book had multiple covers! Of course, sometimes the different covers aren't obviously better and worse. But when they are, it's very useful to be able say the book is more like Cover A than Cover B.