A Little Fungi Hurt No One: Mushroom Book Covers

March 13, 2023 |

There’s been a really fun book cover trend over the last few years, and it corresponds with a rise in both the cottagecore aesthetic and the rise of this as a horror theme: mushrooms. I’m a big fan of fungi, and I love when mushrooms pepper my native garden after the rain. They’re fascinating and creepy, by turns safe and poisonous, depending on what kind of ‘shroom you’re dealing with.

Mushrooms make perfect sense as a cover element, whether it’s front and center or part of the background of a bigger design. Mushrooms come in so many shapes and sizes, and they’re alien; they’re a reminder of the weird and magical right here on Earth. As you’ll see, many of the books below play with genre, whether toeing the line between memoir and something else or dancing between the world as we know it and a world with a little more magic, mystery, and intrigue.

In honor of (almost) spring and the (almost) return of mushroom season, let’s take a look at several mushroom book covers from the last few years. This won’t have every one, so of course, leave your favorite recent mushroom book covers in the comments. I’ve only included books where the mushrooms are easily identifiable on the book cover; there are some well-known and solid reads where mushrooms play a major role but do not necessarily make an appearance on the cover.

Book descriptions come from Amazon. Books span both YA and adult titles, fiction and nonfiction (minus obvious books about mushrooms, since that feels too obvious), so there’s going to likely be something intriguing here for every kind of fun guy. Note that I’ve done my best to identify the book cover designers and artists. It is still very difficult to do this without the book in hand, as few publishers give credit to their artists or designers either on their website or even when they do cover reveals.

Recent Mushroom Book Covers

Fieldwork: A Forager’s Memoir by Iliana Regan, design by Morgan Krehbiel

Not long after Iliana Regan’s celebrated debut, Burn the Place, became the first food-related title in four decades to become a National Book Award nominee in 2019, her career as a Michelin star–winning chef took a sharp turn north. Long based in Chicago, she and her new wife, Anna, decided to create a culinary destination, the Milkweed Inn, located in Michigan’s remote Upper Peninsula, where much of the food served to their guests would be foraged by Regan herself in the surrounding forest and nearby river. Part fresh challenge, part escape, Regan’s move to the forest was also a return to her rural roots, in an effort to deepen the intimate connection to nature and the land that she’d long expressed as a chef, but experienced most intensely growing up.

On her family’s farm in rural Indiana, Regan was the beloved youngest in a family with three much older sisters. From a very early age, her relationship with her mother and father was shaped by her childhood identification as a boy. Her father treated her like the son he never had, and together they foraged for mushrooms, berries, herbs, and other wild food in the surrounding countryside—especially her grandfather’s nearby farm, where they also fished in its pond and young Iliana explored the accumulated family treasures stored in its dusty barn. Her father would share stories of his own grandmother, Busia, who’d helped run a family inn while growing up in eastern Europe, from which she imported her own wild legends of her native forests, before settling in Gary, Indiana, and opening Jennie’s Café, a restaurant that fed generations of local steelworkers. He also shared with Iliana a steady supply of sharp knives and—as she got older—guns.

Iliana’s mother had family stories as well—not only of her own years marrying young, raising headstrong girls, and cooking at Jennie’s, but also of her father, Wayne, who spent much of his boyhood hunting with the men of his family in the frozen reaches of rural Canada. The stories from this side of Regan’s family are darker, riven with alcoholism and domestic strife too often expressed in the harm, physical and otherwise, perpetrated by men—harm men do to women and families, and harm men do to the entire landscapes they occupy.

As Regan explores the ancient landscape of Michigan’s boreal forest, her stories of the land, its creatures, and its dazzling profusion of plant and vegetable life are interspersed with her and Anna’s efforts to make a home and a business of an inn that’s suddenly, as of their first full season there in 2020, empty of guests due to the COVID-19 pandemic. She discovers where the wild blueberry bushes bear tiny fruit, where to gather wood sorrel, and where and when the land’s different mushroom species appear—even as surrounding parcels of land are suddenly and violently decimated by logging crews that obliterate plant life and drive away the area’s birds. Along the way she struggles not only with the threat of COVID, but also with her personal and familial legacies of addiction, violence, fear, and obsession—all while she tries to conceive a child that she and her immune-compromised wife hope to raise in their new home.

With Burn the Place, Regan announced herself as a writer whose extravagant, unconventional talents matched her abilities as a lauded chef. In Fieldwork, she digs even deeper to express the meaning and beauty we seek in the landscapes, and stories, that reveal the forces which inform, shape, and nurture our lives.

Birds of Maine by Michael DeForge, cover by the author

Take flight to this post-apocalyptic utopia filled with birds.

Birds roam freely around the Moon complete with fruitful trees, sophisticated fungal networks, and an enviable socialist order. The universal worm feeds all, there are no weekends, and economics is as fantastical a study as unicorn psychology. No concept of money or wealth plagues the thoughts of these free-minded birds. Instead, there are angsty teens who form bands to show off their best bird song and other youngsters who yearn to become clothing designers even though clothes are only necessary during war. (The truly honourable professions for most birds are historian and/or librarian.) These birds are free to crush on hot pelicans and live their best lives until a crash-landed human from Earth threatens to change everything.

Michael DeForge’s post-apocalyptic reality brings together the author’s quintessential deadpan humour, surrealist imagination, and undeniable socio-political insight. Appearing originally as a webcomic, Birds of Maine follows DeForge’s prolific trajectory of astounding graphic novels that reimagine and question the world as we know it. His latest comic captures the optimistic glow of utopian imagination with a late-capitalism sting of irony.

City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff VanderMeer

City of elegance and squalor. Of religious fervor and wanton lusts. And everywhere, on the walls of courtyards and churches, an incandescent fungus of mysterious and ominous origin. In Ambergris, a would-be suitor discovers that a sunlit street can become a killing ground in the blink of an eye. An artist receives an invitation to a beheading—and finds himself enchanted. And a patient in a mental institution is convinced that he’s made up a city called Ambergris, imagined its every last detail, and that he’s really from a place called Chicago . . .

By turns sensuous and terrifying, filled with exotica and eroticism, this interwoven collection of stories, histories, and “eyewitness” reports invokes a universe within a puzzle box where you can lose—and find—yourself again.

Fruiting Bodies by Kathryn Harlan

This genre-bending debut collection of stories constructs eight eerie worlds full of desire, wisdom, and magic blooming amidst decay.

In stories that beckon and haunt, Fruiting Bodies ranges confidently from the fantastical to the gothic to the uncanny as it follows characters—mostly queer, mostly women—on the precipice of change. Echoes of timeless myth and folklore reverberate through urgent narratives of discovery, appetite, and coming-of-age in a time of crisis.

In “The Changeling,” two young cousins wait in dread for a new family member to arrive, convinced that he may be a dangerous supernatural creature. In “Endangered Animals,” Jane prepares to say goodbye to her almost-love while they road-trip across a country irrevocably altered by climate change. In “Take Only What Belongs to You,” a queer woman struggles with the personal history of an author she idolized, while in “Fiddler, Fool, Pair,” an anthropologist is drawn into a magical—and dangerous—gamble. In the title story, partners Agnes and Geb feast peacefully on the mushrooms that sprout from Agnes’s body—until an unwanted male guest disturbs their cloistered home.

Audacious, striking, and wholly original, Fruiting Bodies offers stories about knowledge in a world on the verge of collapse, knowledge that alternately empowers or devastates. Pulling beautifully, brazenly, from a variety of literary traditions, Kathryn Harlan firmly establishes herself as a thrilling new voice in fiction.

Ghost Music by An Yu, design Suzanne Dean

For three years, Song Yan has filled the emptiness of her Beijing apartment with the tentative notes of her young piano students. She gave up on her own career as a concert pianist many years ago, but her husband Bowen, an executive at a car company, has long rebuffed her pleas to have a child. He resists even when his mother arrives from the southwestern Chinese region of Yunnan and begins her own campaign for a grandchild. As tension in the household rises, it becomes harder for Song Yan to keep her usual placid demeanor, especially since she is troubled by dreams of a doorless room she can’t escape, populated only by a strange orange mushroom.

When a parcel of mushrooms native to her mother-in-law’s province is delivered seemingly by mistake, Song Yan sees an opportunity to bond with her, and as the packages continue to arrive every week, the women stir-fry and grill the mushrooms, adding them to soups and noodles. When a letter arrives in the mail from the sender of the mushrooms, Song Yan’s world begins to tilt further into the surreal. Summoned to an uncanny, seemingly ageless house hidden in a hutong that sits in the middle of the congested city, she finds Bai Yu, a once world-famous pianist who disappeared ten years ago.

A gorgeous and atmospheric novel of art and expression, grief and survival, memory and self-discovery, Ghost Music animates contemporary Beijing through the eyes of a lonely yet hopeful young woman and gives vivid color and texture to the promise of new beginnings.

The Hedge Witch (Novella) by Cari Thomas, Cover by Andrew Davis

Rowan is visiting her aunt – Winne the hedge witch – in the Welsh countryside, to get back to nature and hone her skills, as well as taking a break from her annoying sisters and enjoying some peace and quiet. However, Rowan soon comes to realise that hedges are a serious business and this isn’t quite the opportunity to rest and escape she thought it might be.

Not only that, but mysterious events around the town are causing panic in the secret magical community and cowans – non-magical folk – are starting to take notice.

Can Rowan hone her hedge craft, try to make some friends and solve the riddle of the mysterious goings-on, or is magic about to be revealed to the world … or at least Wales?

High Times in the Low Parliament by Kelly Robson, Cover art and design by Kate Forrester

Award-winning author Kelly Robson returns with High Times in the Low Parliament, a lighthearted romp through an 18th-century London featuring flirtatious scribes, irritable fairies, and the dangers of Parliament.

Lana Baker is Aldgate’s finest scribe, with a sharp pen and an even sharper wit. Gregarious, charming, and ever so eager to please, she agrees to deliver a message for another lovely scribe in exchange for kisses and ends up getting sent to Low Parliament by a temperamental fairy as a result.

As Lana transcribes the endless circular arguments of Parliament, the debates grow tenser and more desperate. Due to long-standing tradition, a hung vote will cause Parliament to flood and a return to endless war. Lana must rely on an unlikely pair of comrades—Bugbite, the curmudgeonly fairy, and Eloquentia, the bewitching human deputy—to save humanity (and maybe even woo one or two lucky ladies), come hell or high water.

Into The Light by Mark Oshiro (3/28/23), Cover art by Carolina Rodriguez Fuenmayor, Cover design by Lesley Worrell

KEEP YOUR SECRETS CLOSE TO HOME

It’s been one year since Manny was cast out of his family and driven into the wilderness of the American Southwest. Since then, Manny lives by self-taught rules that keep him moving—and keep him alive. Now, he’s taking a chance on a traveling situation with the Varela family, whose attractive but surly son, Carlos, seems to promise a new future.

Eli abides by the rules of his family, living in a secluded community that raised him to believe his obedience will be rewarded. But an unsettling question slowly eats away at Eli’s once unwavering faith in Reconciliation: Why can’t he remember his past?

But the reported discovery of an unidentified body in the hills of Idyllwild, California, will draw both of these young men into facing their biggest fears and confronting their own identity—and who they are allowed to be.

For fans of Courtney Summers and Tiffany D. Jackson, Into the Light is a ripped-from-the-headlines story with Oshiro’s signature mix of raw emotions and visceral prose—but with a startling twist you’ll have to read to believe.

Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon, Cover art by Abby Kagan

A triumphant, genre-bending breakout novel from one of the boldest new voices in contemporary fiction.

Vern―seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised―flees for the shelter of the woods. There, she gives birth to twins, and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world.

But even in the forest, Vern is a hunted woman. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes.

To understand her metamorphosis and to protect her small family, Vern has to face the past, and more troublingly, the future―outside the woods. Finding the truth will mean uncovering the secrets of the compound she fled but also the violent history in America that produced it.

Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland is a genre-bending work of Gothic fiction. Here, monsters aren’t just individuals, but entire nations. It is a searing, seminal book that marks the arrival of a bold, unignorable voice in American fiction.

Tastes Like War by Grace M. Cho

Grace M. Cho grew up as the daughter of a white American merchant marine and the Korean bar hostess he met abroad. They were one of few immigrants in a xenophobic small town during the Cold War, where identity was politicized by everyday details—language, cultural references, memories, and food. When Grace was fifteen, her dynamic mother experienced the onset of schizophrenia, a condition that would continue and evolve for the rest of her life.

Part food memoir, part sociological investigation, Tastes Like War is a hybrid text about a daughter’s search through intimate and global history for the roots of her mother’s schizophrenia. In her mother’s final years, Grace learned to cook dishes from her parent’s childhood in order to invite the past into the present, and to hold space for her mother’s multiple voices at the table. And through careful listening over these shared meals, Grace discovered not only the things that broke the brilliant, complicated woman who raised her—but also the things that kept her alive.

Weyward by Emilia Hart

I am a Weyward, and wild inside.

2019: Under cover of darkness, Kate flees London for ramshackle Weyward Cottage, inherited from a great aunt she barely remembers. With its tumbling ivy and overgrown garden, the cottage is worlds away from the abusive partner who tormented Kate. But she begins to suspect that her great aunt had a secret. One that lurks in the bones of the cottage, hidden ever since the witch-hunts of the 17th century.

1619: Altha is awaiting trial for the murder of a local farmer who was stampeded to death by his herd. As a girl, Altha’s mother taught her their magic, a kind not rooted in spell casting but in a deep knowledge of the natural world. But unusual women have always been deemed dangerous, and as the evidence for witchcraft is set out against Altha, she knows it will take all of her powers to maintain her freedom.

1942: As World War II rages, Violet is trapped in her family’s grand, crumbling estate. Straitjacketed by societal convention, she longs for the robust education her brother receives––and for her mother, long deceased, who was rumored to have gone mad before her death. The only traces Violet has of her are a locket bearing the initial W and the word weyward scratched into the baseboard of her bedroom.

Weaving together the stories of three extraordinary women across five centuries, Emilia Hart’s Weyward is an enthralling novel of female resilience and the transformative power of the natural world.

What Goes Up by Christine Heppermann

(Those are mushroom prints!)

When Jorie wakes up in the loft bed of a college boy she doesn’t recognize, she’s instantly filled with regret. What happened the night before? What led her to this place? Was it her father’s infidelity? Her mother’s seemingly weak acceptance? Her recent breakup with Ian, the boy who loved her art and supported her through the hardest time of her life?

As Jorie tries to reconstruct the events that led her to this point, free verse poems lead the reader through the current morning, as well as flashbacks to her relationships with her parents, her friends, her boyfriend, and the previous night.

With Poisoned Apples: Poems for You, My Pretty and Ask Me How I Got Here, Christine Heppermann established herself as a vital voice in thought-provoking and powerful feminist writing for teens. Her poetry is surprising, wry, emotional, and searing. What Goes Up is by turns a scorchingly funny and a deeply emotional story that asks whether it’s possible to support and love someone despite the risk of being hurt. Readers of Laura Ruby, E. K. Johnston, Elana K. Arnold, and Laurie Halse Anderson will find a complicated heroine they won’t soon forget.

What Moves The Dead by T. Kingfisher

When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruritania.

What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed wildlife, surrounding a dark, pulsing lake. Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother Roderick is consumed with a mysterious malady of the nerves.

Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and a baffled American doctor, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.

At the Publisher’s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

It’s (Not) Always Sunny with YA Sunflower Book Covers

January 16, 2023 |

Here’s a fun little trend in the world of YA book covers over the last couple of years: sunflowers. But they’re not always sunny, happy sunflowers gracing these covers. In some instances, they’re downright terrifying sunflowers. The kind of sunflowers that makes you wonder why you’re not more suspicious of such towering plants that take hold in mid to late summer.

I’ve rounded up a few recent YA sunflower book covers. I love how none of these are exactly, err, sunny at all.

Descriptions come from ‘zon, and cover artist information is included where possible. Can you think of other YA sunflower covers from the last year or two? I’d love to hear them.

Things That Grow by Meredith Goldstein; Cover designed by Celeste Knudsen

When Lori’s Dorothy Parker–loving grandmother dies, Lori’s world is turned upside down. Grandma Sheryl was everything to Lori—and not just because Sheryl raised Lori when Lori’s mom got a job out of town. Now Lori’s mom is insisting on moving her away from her beloved Boston right before senior year. Desperate to stay for as long as possible, Lori insists on honoring her grandmother’s last request before she moves: to scatter Sheryl’s ashes near things that grow.

Along with her uncle Seth and Chris, best friend and love-of-her-life crush, Lori sets off on a road trip to visit her grandmother’s favorite gardens. Dodging forest bathers, scandalized volunteers, and angry homeowners, they come to terms with the shape of life after Grandma Sheryl. Saying goodbye isn’t easy, but Lori might just find a way to move forward surrounded by the people she loves.

The Undead Truth of Us by Britney S. Lewis; Cover Design by Zareen Johnson and illustrated by Adekunle Adeleke

Sixteen-year-old Zharie Young is absolutely certain her mother morphed into a zombie before her untimely death, but she can’t seem to figure out why. Why her mother died, why her aunt doesn’t want her around, why all her dreams seem suddenly, hopelessly out of reach. And why, ever since that day, she’s been seeing zombies everywhere.

Then Bo moves into her apartment building―tall, skateboard in hand, freckles like stars, and an undeniable charm. Z wants nothing to do with him, but when he transforms into a half zombie right before her eyes, something feels different. He contradicts everything she thought she knew about monsters, and she can’t help but wonder if getting to know him might unlock the answers to her mother’s death.

As Zharie sifts through what’s real and what’s magic, she discovers a new truth about the world: Love can literally change you―for good or for dead.

In this surrealist journey of grief, fear, and hope, Britney S. Lewis’s debut novel explores love, zombies, and everything in between in an intoxicating amalgam of the real and the fantastic.

We Deserve Monuments by Jas Hammonds; Cover design by Beth Clark and Sarah Kaufman, art by Laylie Frazier.

What’s more important? Knowing the truth or keeping the peace?

Seventeen-year-old Avery Anderson is convinced her senior year is ruined when she’s uprooted from her life in DC and forced into the hostile home of her terminally ill grandmother, Mama Letty. The tension between Avery’s mom and Mama Letty makes for a frosty arrival and unearths past drama they refuse to talk about. Every time Avery tries to look deeper, she’s turned away, leaving her desperate to learn the secrets that split her family in two.

While tempers flare in her avoidant family, Avery finds friendship in unexpected places: in Simone Cole, her captivating next-door neighbor, and Jade Oliver, daughter of the town’s most prominent family—whose mother’s murder remains unsolved.

As the three girls grow closer—Avery and Simone’s friendship blossoming into romance—the sharp-edged opinions of their small southern town begin to hint at something insidious underneath. The racist history of Bardell, Georgia is rooted in Avery’s family in ways she can’t even imagine. With Mama Letty’s health dwindling every day, Avery must decide if digging for the truth is worth toppling the delicate relationships she’s built in Bardell—or if some things are better left buried.

Where Darkness Blooms by Andrea Hannah; Cover Design by Olga Grlic and art by Marcela Bolívar (2/21/23)

The town of Bishop is known for exactly two things: recurring windstorms and an endless field of sunflowers that stretches farther than the eye can see. And women―missing women. So when three more women disappear one stormy night, no one in Bishop is surprised. The case is closed and their daughters are left in their dusty shared house with the shattered pieces of their lives. Until the wind kicks up a terrible secret at their mothers’ much-delayed memorial.

With secrets come the lies each of the girls is forced to confront. After caring for the other girls, Delilah would like to move on with her boyfriend, Bennett, but she can’t bear his touch. Whitney has already lost both her mother and her girlfriend, Eleanor, and now her only solace is an old weathervane that seems to whisper to her. Jude, Whitney’s twin sister, would rather ignore it all, but the wind kicks up her secret too: the summer fling she had with Delilah’s boyfriend. And more than anything, Bo wants answers and she wants them now. Something happened to their mothers and the townsfolk know what it was. She’s sure of it.

Bishop has always been a strange town. But what the girls don’t know is that Bishop was founded on blood―and now it craves theirs.

Rainbow Cakes on Book Covers

June 20, 2022 |

It’s been a minute, hasn’t it? I’ve had on my to-write list for a while a few things, one of which is a post reflecting on the fact this blog had its 14th birthday in April and how much has changed in both my life and in Kimberly’s lives since. I’ll get to it, but as a means of wading back into the world of book blogging for fun, how about a trend that is delicious and timely? I’m talking about rainbow cakes on book covers.

Find below a few book covers, all capital-R romance titles, featuring a delicious rainbow cake on the cover. I’ve done my best to find the designer information, and I’ve included the Amazon description for included titles so you can build yourself the tastiest reading list imaginable. Interestingly, all three books are out this year. I hope we’ll see more of this design incorporated into more books, too–it’s a perfect nod to queerness and sweetness, all at once.

Are there others that I’ve missed? Tell me about those delightful queer cakes in the comments below.

Queerly Beloved by Susie Dumond. Cover design by Sarah Horgan.

Amy, a semicloseted queer baker and bartender in mid-2010s Oklahoma, has spent a lifetime putting other people’s needs before her own. Until, that is, she’s fired from her job at a Christian bakery and turns her one-off gig subbing in for a bridesmaid into a full-time business, thanks to her baking talents, crafting skills, and years watching rom-coms and Say Yes to the Dress. Between her new gig and meeting Charley, the attractive engineer who’s just moved to Tulsa, suddenly Amy’s found something—and someone—she actually wants.

Her tight-knit group of chosen family is thrilled that Amy is becoming her authentic self. But when her deep desire to please kicks into overdrive, Amy’s precarious balancing act strains her relationships to the breaking point, and she must decide what it looks like to be true to herself—and if she has the courage to try.

Paris Daillencourt Is About to Crumble by Alexis Hall (10/18/22). Cover design by Elizabeth Turner Stokes.

Paris Daillencourt is a recipe for disaster. Despite his passion for baking, his cat, and his classics degree, constant self-doubt and second-guessing have left him a curdled, directionless mess. So when his roommate enters him in Bake Expectations, the nation’s favourite baking show, Paris is sure he’ll be the first one sent home.

But not only does he win week one’s challenge—he meets fellow contestant Tariq Hassan. Sure, he’s the competition, but he’s also cute and kind, with more confidence than Paris could ever hope to have. Still, neither his growing romance with Tariq nor his own impressive bakes can keep Paris’s fear of failure from spoiling his happiness. And when the show’s vicious fanbase confirms his worst anxieties, Paris’s confidence is torn apart quicker than tear-and-share bread.

But if Paris can find the strength to face his past, his future, and the chorus of hecklers that live in his brain, he’ll realize it’s the sweet things in life that he really deserves.

D’Vaughn and Kris Plan a Wedding by Chencia C. Higgins.

D’Vaughn and Kris have six weeks to plan their dream wedding.

Their whole relationship is fake.

Instant I Do could be Kris Zavala’s big break. She’s right on the cusp of really making it as an influencer, so a stint on reality TV is the perfect chance to elevate her brand. And $100,000 wouldn’t hurt, either.

D’Vaughn Miller is just trying to break out of her shell. She’s sort of neglected to come out to her mom for years, so a big splashy fake wedding is just the excuse she needs.

All they have to do is convince their friends and family they’re getting married in six weeks. If anyone guesses they’re not for real, they’re out. Selling their chemistry on camera is surprisingly easy, and it’s still there when no one else is watching, which is an unexpected bonus. Winning this competition is going to be a piece of wedding cake.

But each week of the competition brings new challenges, and soon the prize money’s not the only thing at stake. A reality show isn’t the best place to create a solid foundation, and their fake wedding might just derail their relationship before it even starts.

Microtrend: YA Tarot Card Book Covers

September 20, 2021 |

How about a fun cover microtrend from 2021 YA books? I like to call these microtrends because unlike noticeable, obvious design choices that parallel one another, these only pop up when you really pay attention. They don’t hit a lot of books, but just a few, and yet because it’s such a hyper-specific design aesthetic, it’s noteworthy.

One that I can’t stop thinking about — perhaps because I believe there’s another one of these hiding in plain sight from either 2020 or 2021 or, perhaps, a forthcoming 2022 title — is the YA tarot card book cover.+ I keep thinking the one I can’t remember is this one or this one, but it is neither. Tarot has popped up quite a big in recent YA, but the actual use of tarot cards on the cover hasn’t really come up. But in 2021, I can immediately identify three that do. They each play with tarot cards a bit differently, so let’s take a look.

Book descriptions are from Goodreads. This little roundup makes me want to pull together a whole list of Tarot in YA books.

All Our Hidden Gifts by Caroline O’Donoghue, Cover art by Lisa Sterle

Maeve’s strangely astute tarot readings make her the talk of the school, until a classmate draws a chilling and unfamiliar card—and then disappears.

After Maeve finds a pack of tarot cards while cleaning out a closet during her in-school suspension, she quickly becomes the most sought-after diviner at St. Bernadette’s Catholic school. But when Maeve’s ex–best friend, Lily, draws an unsettling card called The Housekeeper that Maeve has never seen before, the session devolves into a heated argument that ends with Maeve wishing aloud that Lily would disappear. When Lily isn’t at school the next Monday, Maeve learns her ex-friend has vanished without a trace.

Shunned by her classmates and struggling to preserve a fledgling romance with Lily’s gender-fluid sibling, Roe, Maeve must dig deep into her connection with the cards to search for clues the police cannot find—even if they lead to the terrifying Housekeeper herself. Set in an Irish town where the church’s tight hold has loosened and new freedoms are trying to take root, this sharply contemporary story is witty, gripping, and tinged with mysticism.

The Salt In Our Blood by Ava Morgyn, Cover art and design by Aphelandra

Ten years ago, Cat’s volatile mother, Mary, left her at her grandmother’s house with nothing but a deck of tarot cards. Now seventeen, Cat is determined to make her life as different from Mary’s as possible. When Cat’s grandmother dies, she’s forced to move to New Orleans with her mother. There, she discovers a picture of Mary holding a baby that’s not her, leading her to unravel a dark family history and challenge her belief that Mary’s mental health issues are the root of all their problems. But as Cat explores the reasons for her mother’s breakdown, she fears she is experiencing her own. Ever since she arrived in New Orleans, she’s been haunted by strangely familiar visitors–in dreams and on the streets of the French Quarter–who know more than they should. Unsure if she can rebuild her relationship with her mother, Cat is realizing she must confront her past, her future, and herself in the fight to try.

These Witches Don’t Burn by Isabel Sterling, Cover artist unknown*

Hannah’s a witch, but not the kind you’re thinking of. She’s the real deal, an Elemental with the power to control fire, earth, water, and air. But even though she lives in Salem, Massachusetts, her magic is a secret she has to keep to herself. If she’s ever caught using it in front of a Reg (read: non-witch), she could lose it. For good. So, Hannah spends most of her time avoiding her ex-girlfriend (and fellow Elemental Witch) Veronica, hanging out with her best friend, and working at the Fly by Night Cauldron selling candles and crystals to tourists, goths, and local Wiccans.

But dealing with her ex is the least of Hannah’s concerns when a terrifying blood ritual interrupts the end-of-school-year bonfire. Evidence of dark magic begins to appear all over Salem, and Hannah’s sure it’s the work of a deadly Blood Witch. The issue is, her coven is less than convinced, forcing Hannah to team up with the last person she wants to see: Veronica.

While the pair attempt to smoke out the Blood Witch at a house party, Hannah meets Morgan, a cute new ballerina in town. But trying to date amid a supernatural crisis is easier said than done, and Hannah will have to test the limits of her power if she’s going to save her coven and get the girl, especially when the attacks on Salem’s witches become deadlier by the day.

*It bothers me to no end when the publisher does a cover reveal and can’t bother to include this information.

+Update: thanks to Iza G (@izag) on Twitter, the mystery of the missing title is solved!

Edie in Between by Laura Sibson

A modern-day Practical Magic about love, loss, and embracing the mystical.

It’s been one year since Edie’s mother died. But her ghost has never left.

According to her GG, it’s tradition that the dead of the Mitchell family linger with the living. It’s just as much a part of a Mitchell’s life as brewing cordials or talking to plants. But Edie, whose pain over losing her mother is still fresh, has no interest in her family’s legacy as local “witches.”

When her mother’s teenage journal tumbles into her life, her family’s mystical inheritance becomes once and for all too hard to ignore. It takes Edie on a scavenger hunt to find objects that once belonged to her mother, each one imbued with a different memory. Every time she touches one of these talismans, it whisks her to another entry inside the journal—where she watches her teenage mom mourn, love, and hope just as Edie herself is now doing. Maybe, just maybe, Edie hopes, if she finds every one of these objects, she can finally make peace with her loss and put the past to rest for good. But this journey to stake her independence from her family may actually show Edie who she truly is…and the beautiful gifts that come with being just a little different.

YA Cover Updates: The Reissue/New Edition Looks For Favorite Reads

October 5, 2020 |

Packed into my list of cover changes to highlight in the coming months are a number of YA books which have been staples in the category for a while or are books that didn’t quite land with audiences when they were first published — as you’ll see, many of them are by and about characters of color — that are getting new looks. These reissue editions are meant to entice new readers or encourage long-time fans to step into the backlist of favorite long-time YA authors. Let’s take a look at some of these YA reissue/new editions and talk about the new looks they’re getting.

Original packaging is on the left, while the new looks are on the right.

Illegal by Bettina Restrepo’s reissue isn’t exactly brand new, but I wanted to begin with this one because the reissue hit shelves in August 2019, when culturally, discussions of immigration really ramped up. It was the perfect timing to bring this book to the attention of YA readers, as it was a debut in 2011. The new and updated look follows what we’ve seen in terms of YA cover trends — it’s illustrated, and we know immediately that the main character is a girl of color — but it doesn’t necessarily convey the same sense of longing that the original cover does. But for today’s YA readers, I suspect that paperback is extremely appealing and the tagline, “We are all immigrants,” nicely conveys the essential nature of Nora’s story.

When I was working as a teen librarian, Helen Frost was a go-to for YA verse novels. I’m not sure whether that’s still the case or not, but I do think the decision to repackage her classic Crossing Stones this August with a new, fresh cover is a smart way to introduce her writing to a new generation of readers. It’s a far more compelling and contemporary cover in paperback, with bright colors, but it’s also quite clear that it’s a historical verse novel given the ways that the characters are dressed. Since it’s set and about the women’s suffrage movement, the choice for putting a strong-looking girl at the center and holding a flag cues the reader to the main character in a way that the somewhat removed, wistful looking girl in the original cover does not. A new tagline was added as well, which reads “Maybe you won’t rock a cradle. Some women prefer to rock the boat.” A definite cover upgrade timed well with the 100th anniversary of (white) women’s suffrage.

I could not love the new look of Cynthia Leitich Smith’s debut YA novel any more. The original cover feels a tiny bit dated, in so much as her style of dress is very early-2000s and the images that are behind her are black and white photographs (and that boy in one of the photographs also does a great job showcasing just how great early 00s was for style). The new look, which will be part of Leitich Smith’s inaugural line for her imprint Heartdrum, hits shelves February 9 and is beautifully contemporary and timeless. It’s illustrated, with a much larger font choice for the title and author, and the style of the girl’s clothing and hair give less clues as to when the book was written and published. I love that it looks like it’s a perfect read for younger YA readers, too, as I think Leitich Smith writes such great work for that emerging YA reader without watering down the big issues she seeks to convey.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee’s Finding My Voice is believed to be the first Asian American #OwnVoices novel for YA readers, and the fact it’s being reissued with such a beautiful, modern cover in December is an utter treat. The original book, published in October of 1992, has a very of-the-time cover. That was a few years before I was reading YA books, but I remember that style of cover being popular for chapter books at the time. It’s not bad nor spectacular but very 1992. What’s interesting and most noteworthy, though, is that Marie’s full-name is not on the cover. Rather, she’s Marie G. Lee, a moniker that doesn’t make her heritage front and center. We really only know that the main character in the story is Asian by the illustration. The new cover, though, highlights Marie’s full name, and it features an incredible illustration of a modern Asian American girl. Like with Leitich Smith’s book above, I’m especially happy to see that her style doesn’t date her, meaning that this design will likely look fresh and modern years from now. The title font is big and central, and the colorful stripes in the background make the cover pop. I don’t know about you, but I am so eager to get my hands on this reissue.

Coming June 1 next year is the five-year anniversary edition of Nina LaCour and David Levithan’s You Know Me Well. What I love about this set of covers is how much they tell you about the ways cover design and the push to see diverse characters on YA book covers has changed in just a short period of time. The initial cover is fine, but it’s very 2016 — it’s font drive, with an illustration that doesn’t really tell you much. If you didn’t know the authors and what they tend to write, you might not pick up the cues that this is a queer YA book by two leading queer YA authors (and yes, there are a lot of YA readers who wouldn’t!). But the paperback reissue is queer as queer can be, without reinventing the entire cover. The bridge is still there, the font for the title is still big and bold, but now you see all kinds of teenagers showing their pride. It’s beautiful and inclusive and tells the reader everything they’d want to know (though if I could nitpick, I’d note that there’s not a physical disability represented, which feels a bit like a missed opportunity given everything else this cover nails). I’m not usually a big fan of taglines, but this one here is a nice addition: “Kate’s in love with Violet. Mark’s in love with Ryan. The hard part comes next.” That hardcover is very much for grownups who are fans of the authors. The paperback? For readers who want queer YA.

What do you think? Favorites in the bunch? Are there any older or classic YA books you’d love to see recovered and repackaged?