Hey everyone! A few weeks ago, I did a post called “Love the Book, Hate the Cover,” where I talked about some of my favorite books that have very unfortunately ugly covers. Now, I thought it would be kind of fun to do the reverse and talk about some books whose content I didn’t love, but whose aesthetics I do.
I want to start with a disclaimer: if I mention a book you love, it is not a personal attack on you. You’re allowed to like these books, just like I’m allowed to dislike them.
Also, the title of this post is kind of a misnomer because honestly, I don’t really hate any of the books I’m going to talk about. It takes a lot to make me legitimately hate a book (or anything, for that matter—I prefer to see the good side of most things), and I actually can’t think of many that I really do hate. With one possible exception, these books were all just not especially interesting or memorable for me.
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Eon by Alison Goodman
I might be kind of cheating by putting this book on this list because I have never completely finished it, so maybe I shouldn’t be judging it, but at this point I have tried reading this book at least twice that I can remember and I just haven’t been able to get into it. I don’t know if I ever will.
I love the colors on the cover, though, and the dragon looks super cool. I love the glint on the swords. Even the font makes the book look so epic. I just wish that the words inside the book appealed to me as much as the cover does, because I would love to be able to rave about this book to you all. Unfortunately, though, I can’t.
The Game of Love and Death by Martha Brockenbrough
This book had such a cool premise, in addition to its really cool cover. It was pitched as a sort of modern rendition of a relationship like Romeo and Juliet’s, or Helen of Troy and Paris’s. You know, star-crossed lovers, where Love and Death are actual beings—basically gods—who have been playing this “game” with each other, and with the unfortunate humans they choose, for centuries. It sounded super cool, and then I read it, and it was lackluster. I remember almost nothing about the plot, and I don’t even remember for sure what the lovers’ names were (I think one of them was Henry?). I literally don’t even remember the ending—I don’t remember if the two lovers Love and Death were playing with ended up happy or not.
The cover is so cool, though. I like the font of the title and the fact that the image is kind of cartoony and seems like it could even be hand-drawn. I like how the hands are creepy-looking, but they also remind me a little of little kids playing pretend, with both of them reaching for the same toy at the same time. I think the cover represents what the story was trying to be very well.
The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness
The concept of this novel is that it’s about all the people who are not the main characters—not the people who go on grand adventures or gain magical powers. While everyone else is in the middle of an epic tale of woe, they are just living their lives, being the background characters in other people’s stories. I remember being underwhelmed by this book, and I don’t remember anything about the characters or the plot at all.
Patrick Ness is a hit or miss author for me. I remember really liking More Than This by him, but I didn’t love his Chaos Walking series. Then I didn’t love this book, either. I’m not ready to say that Patrick Ness doesn’t work for me as an author because he always seems to write books that have really interesting concepts.
Landline by Rainbow Rowell
I’m not positive this book counts either because I don’t remember if I ever read the whole thing, but a while back I started listening to the audiobook and I never managed to get into it. Maybe part of that is just because it’s an adult contemporary about a married woman, and I am a 19-year-old in college who has never been married and isn’t planning on being married anytime really soon. I couldn’t exactly relate.
Still, I do love the cover of this book. I love how the font of the title turns into a phone cord that disappears off the side of the cover. I like how bright the phone is, and I even like the shade of gray that makes up the majority of the book. I have a thing for covers that look almost like they were drawn.
Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire
This cover is so whimsical. I like how the words of the title are going through the door, and how the whole image feels like something out of a fairytale. It matches the idea of portal fantasies so well, and this whole book (and from what I understand, the rest of the series) is about what happens to children after they come back from a fantasy world, which sounded like something right up my alley.
The actual book, however, was so short that, at least for me, it didn’t have much of a chance to properly develop the characters or plot. I still plan on reading at least a few more books in the series, anyway. The rest of the series also has some pretty cool covers.
The Wicked Deep by Shea Ernshaw
This is one of the most disappointing books on this list, for me. The premise of the book is that back during the witch hunting days of America, three sisters were drowned as witches and ever since then they have come back to haunt the town every summer. They possess the bodies of three girls in the town and try to lure boys to the harbor to drown them. And the cover is beautiful with its shiny silvers and dark blues.
The story ended up having way too much of an emphasis on romance for my taste, and not enough emphasis on the mystery of the Swan sisters. It just wasn’t at all what I was expecting, and not in a good way.
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That’s all of the books I had to talk about today! Thanks for reading! I’ll see you soon!
-Ariel