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Hardcover to Paperback Redesigns: 7 To Consider

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Are you ready for another round of YA design changes? Here’s a look at seven books — eight, actually, since one is a series redesign — that will be getting new designs in their paperback incarnations. Some of these are great redesigns and others aren’t as great as the original looks.

Sick by Tom Leveen is getting a new look in paperback that doesn’t do it better nor worse than the original. This is a zombie apocalypse story, set in a high school. The original cover on the left gets at that pretty well. I love the fact it’s only black, red, and white. It’s stark, and at the same time, it’s a little bit funny (because this book is a little bit funny, even though it’s horror). The font for the title works, and I dig how the “C” is in a different font than the rest of the letters, and the three boys wielding weapons are centered within it, somewhat protected but somewhat vulnerable, since a “C” isn’t a closed letter. This cover skews on the younger end of YA for me, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and for younger teen readers who want a zombie story, I think this one is fine. This cover works.

The paperback, available August 26, takes the look in an entirely different direction and yet, it still contains a lot of the original elements. This cover is more stark but still has the red, black, and white as the only colors. Rather than feature the zombie hordes, it features a lone, disgusting zombie at the top. The zombie’s mouth is dripping blood right into the “I” of “Sick,” which is kind of a neat effect. But I wonder: why is the zombie wearing nail polish? That’s not blood; that’s polish. Would a once-alive, now-zombified person’s nail polish look that good? I have some doubts about that.

I appreciate that the cover kept the “C” the same as it was on the original image, with the boys in the middle. The tag line stayed exactly the same, though the paperback features a pull quote from one of the trade reviews: “Gore and action will leave enthralled readers thrilled.” I think that quote actually grounds the cover a bit, giving it — and the bloody letter — an older and edgier look than the paperback. What really separates the two covers, though, is that the original doesn’t give a huge indication this is a zombie story. It tells you something bad is going on, but the figures aren’t perfectly clear in terms of what they are; you could guess, but it’s not super obvious to the casual reader or browser. In the paperback copy, you know pretty well that the sick creatures are zombies.

Neither cover does it better for me. They’re built for different readerships: the first probably for those who’d want a lighter zombie romp and the second for those who are seeking a ZOMBIE STORY.

Leslie Stella’s Permanent Record is a book I talked about a little over a year ago when a few of us did a read along to Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War, as it’s a great read alike. The original cover, though, would not tell you that, nor would it tell you anything, really, about the content of the story. Is it a book about tagging? Graffiti? About paper bombs? Explosions? Even the blurb on the cover indicates nothing: “A smart, funny, complex novel . . . Leslie Stella is a brilliant writer.” To the average browser, this means nothing. To even the more well-read, that blurb tells you nothing except it’s supposed to be a smart, funny, and complex book. But what is it?

While I think the cover doesn’t say anything, it’s still an attractive cover. I think it almost works in making someone pick it up because they’ll be compelled by the image to find out what it is about. It’s ultimately a story about fitting in and about bullying, and it’s contemporary realistic. The paper bomb on the cover fits with a part of the story, and the title, Permanent Record, is about Badi, the main character.

The paperback edition of Permanent Record, available August 14, is a slight improvement on the original in that it grounds the story a bit more with a genre. You know it’s going to be a realistic novel because it features the lower-half of a trio of real people. It looks like so many other realistic YA titles out there that use stock images of people. I’m not entirely sure, though, I understand this particular stock image. The kids look like they’re going camping, not attending school deep inside Chicago proper. What’s interesting, though, is it looks almost like the two boys in the picture are people of color — it’s interesting because that’s a rarity but, unfortunately, we don’t get to see their faces to know if they really are. And since this is a story about a person of color, it would have been awesome to see that head-on. The font for the title, as well as Stella’s name, are a marked improvement from the hardcover. It looks like the blurb is gone from the paperback, as well.

For me, the winner is the paperback in this round. It looks more polished and tells a little more about the book itself.

Maureen McGowan’s “The Dust Chronicles” series, which is a trilogy comprised of Deviants, Compliance, and Glory, got easily one of the best makeovers when the third book was published last month. Gone are the somewhat cheap, young images of the original look. They’ve been replaced with covers that look fancy and much more like a compelling dystopian world. I really don’t have a whole lot to comment on beyond saying that this is a marked improvement in cover design and it actually piques my curiosity in the series.

All of the redesigns of this one are available now.

Interestingly, this series, as well as Permanent Record, are titles published by Amazon’s YA imprint. Part of me wonders if when they began this publishing arm, they didn’t quite have a grasp on cover design. Because now that they’re a little deeper into the territory, they’re doing a better and better job (have you seen this great cover for Gwenda Bond’s forthcoming Girl on a Wire? It’s outstanding).

I read Bill Konigsberg’s Out of the Pocket way back when it came out in 2008. I loved this book then and it’s still one I think about all the time. It’s about a football player in southern California who also happens to be gay. No one knows that yet, except his best friend. But when his best friend doesn’t keep a lid on it, the story leaks and suddenly, he’s in the spotlight not just with his team, but with the whole country. It’s a well-done story about sexuality and football and what it means to be a gay football player when that’s far from an easy place to be because of what football is culturally.

The original cover for this one depicts that it’s a football story. It’s quite similar to another book that came out around the same time: Tim Tharp’s Knights of Hill Country. It’s not a bad cover by any means, and it speaks to those readers who like a good football book — and Konigsberg’s book fits that bill.

But I have so much love for this paperback cover. Released earlier this year through a different publisher than the hardcover, the paperback gets at not only the fact this is a book featuring sports and athletics, but it really nails that it’s a story about one boy who happens to be an athlete. He looks rugged and tough, but there’s something in his expression that also renders him a bit sensitive, like there’s something beneath that surface begging to be drawn out.

The paperback looks like the kind of cover that would speak to a much wider range of readers than the hardcover because it’s not limiting itself to readers who want a book about sports. It still says sports story to me, but that’s not all that it says. It’s a winner.

I used to ask my teen readers about book covers a lot as a means of finding out whether what I was thinking about covers and cover design was in line with what they were thinking. One particular cover I asked about a few years back was Siobhan Vivian’s Not That Kind of Girl. It was a cover my girls in particular disliked because it didn’t fit the story at all — to them, it said this was a romance, rather than a feminist novel about a girl who happens to experience a little romance in the story. The “just about to kiss” was a trend then, and Vivian’s cover looked quite a bit like the one on Sarah Mlynowski’s Ten Things We Did.

During a lock in one night, I had my girls redesign covers of books they read and they thought were misleading. Vivian’s was one they chose to redesign, and what’s most interesting to me now is how close their imagined design was to the newly repackaged cover of Not That Kind of Girl, coming out July 29. Rather than play up the romance, the new cover plays up the fact this is a story about a girl who doesn’t see herself like the other girls around her (and yes, that annoying aspect of “not that kind of girl” is purposeful and undermined in the story because this is a whip-smart feminist novel). This new cover captures that to a T, with one girl singled out among the ranks of her classmates who appear to be the same, even though they are the same only in clothing.

While I think the outfits may make the girls in the background look a little corporate and maybe a little beyond high school age, the girl at the center is one of the rare times I’ve seen a model on a YA cover that screams teen girl to me. Often, they look like 20-somethings, rather than teens. This girl, though? She’s a teenager.

I love, too, how this cover fits nicely with Vivian’s cover for The List. It’s a really strong repackaging and I hope when Vivian’s other two novels are recovered, they follow in this trend. It’s a good one.

The original print run for Katie Cotugno’s How to Love surprised me when I looked it up. It was much bigger than I thought. This is a book I’d heard about and have a review copy of (still) but it’s one that I saw few reviews of that compelled me to pick it up. I actually saw few reviews period, though I have been fascinated in the publication journey of this particular book, since it’s a partial Alloy product.

The design for the hardcover might have been one of the first font-driven, image-only covers to publish before the trend took full-hold of the YA world. It’s clean, but it’s not particularly unique nor compelling. It’s the kind of cover that tells you there’s romance — the title and the heart alone would do that — and it looks like the kind of cover with great crossover appeal to adult readers.

But maybe the font-driven, image design isn’t for all books, since this is going the opposite direction in its paperback makeover, due out next March. The paperback returns to the stock image, this time of a couple not just kissing but in full-out holding each other mode. I have to say I’m not really paying a lot of attention to the couple though (which, they don’t look like teenagers, do they?). I’m too distracted by that obnoxious wallpaper in the background of this cover. Where are they? Who made that wallpaper choice?

Does this girl have really long arms, too? The way her hand is able to reach around his neck and clasp onto her opposite shoulder makes me think she has the longest arms in the world. Or maybe that guy has the world’s smallest neck.

Neither of these covers really does it for me, though I think if I had to pick one, it’d be the original cover. The paperback, save the wallpaper, is really generic.

The last cover in this roundup worth talking about is the one for Vikki Wakefield’s Friday Never Leaving, a book that came out last year and not enough people talked about (I enjoyed it a lot and am sad more people have not picked it up).

This is an Australian import which got a new look in America in the hardcover on the left. It’s a girl underwater, but unlike a lot of books that have the girl underwater look going for them, that’s actually an important part of the story. But as it’s done on the cover here, I don’t know that it’s compelling, and I don’t think the very thin, very spread out font for the title helps much. The whiteness of the title fades out, and more, Wakefield’s name is very easy to miss since it’s so tiny. While I think the cover says it’s a literary novel — and it is — I don’t think the cover is particularly appealing. It’s understated to a point where it just fades into the shelves and every other book out there.

The paperback of Friday Never Leaving will be available September 9 and . . . it looks like a cover that missed the “girls laying in water” trend from a few years ago. It’s dated. But what’s worse is that it’s also really unattractive in its color palate. It looks dirty, rather than polished. The girl would actually melt into the water if it weren’t for her odd placement on the cover, just below the bottom of “Leaving.” The font here is still not great, as it’s too thin and too easily overlooked, and while Wakefield’s name got larger in the paperback, it’s still very easy to miss, as it fades into the image.

It looks generic and forgettable.

What’s interesting is that the original cover for Wakefield’s novel from Australia, as well as the UK edition, are so good:

These covers stand out, they’re fresh, and they’re relevant to the story itself. They’re much more eye-catching than what’s been created in the US. I can’t help but wonder if the bland designs have been part of why I haven’t seen more talk about this book — it’s easy to overlook and easy to write off.

This Week in Reading: Volume II

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I tried out “This Week in Reading” last week as a way to talk about both the books and the links I’ve come across in the past week, and I’m bringing it back again this week. It’s a snapshot into the books that showed up, the things I read, and the things I’ve been thinking about. 
Lauren Oliver’s Rooms — her first adult novel — is the only book that came to me this week I didn’t buy. I’m interested to see how her adult novel holds up, especially since her last couple of YA titles haven’t impressed me a whole lot. Maybe this one will do the job.
I bought two books this week: Carrie Harris’s Demon Derby and the ebook edition of Crissa-Jean Chappell’s Total Constant Order (tracking down this backlist title in print that isn’t a used copy was not very easy). I started in on the Chappell title last night and I’m really looking forward to getting into Demon Derby soon since I know it’ll be the kind of fun reading I appreciate from Harris. 
I think sometimes we forget how great those fun books can be. 
It’s been a rough week here, and in the midst of it, I put in a huge book order for myself that should arrive next week. In addition to that, though, I find when things get rough, the only way I can get myself through is by reading. So I managed to read quite a bit:

Anatomy of a Boyfriend by Daria Snadowsky: This was a great book about a first love and exceptionally positive of female sexuality. I’ll talk more about this one soon, but I’m planning on picking up the sequel very soon. I loved the voice.

Blind by Rachel DeWoskin: I quit this one after 100 pages. While I appreciated what DeWoskin did with her main character’s need to describe the world around her as she approaches it (she’s blind), the writing itself left a lot to be desired. The story didn’t begin in the right place and moved at a glacial pace. At over 400 pages, I couldn’t do it when, at page 100, nothing had happened and I had no attachment to the characters at all.

The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison: I’ve been picking at this one for a few months and finally just sat down to finish it. I’m glad I did. I loved this series of essays — some which connected in terms of recurring characters — about what empathy looks like and what human emotions connect us and the hows and whys of those connections. My favorite essay in the entire book is available in full online and I encourage it to get a sense of what the book looks like. I’ll definitely be reading more essay collections following this. It’s an underappreciated medium (and one I found myself loving after reading Eula Biss’s Notes From No Man’s Land last year).

Sway by Kat Spears (September 16): There was some stuff I liked — Jesse’s voice is good and there are some good relationships — but as much as I love edgy, dark, boundary-pushing stuff, this one may have gone too far for me to really enjoy. There’s a joke about a time during a party that turns into date rape time and it was then I just….even if it was Jesse’s character to be so crass, I don’t think it’s an okay joke. And there’s some depictions of fat people in here that rubbed me really wrong. I have a feeling people are going to dislike a lot of other things in this book when more have read it. The cover is terribly misleading; this is no sweet romance.

A few things worth reading from around the internet this week, some book-related and some not:

  • Kathleen Hale wrote a really thoughtful essay about the Slender Man stabbing that took place not far from where I live. It’s about how Slender Man makes for a great scapegoat for the real issues at hand in being a middle school girl. Not easy reading, but really worthwhile for anyone who cares about pre-teen and teenagers, especially girls. 

  • This piece, “Cultivating Curiosity,” is about a love of stories and storytelling, over a pure love for words and language. I especially love the part about how a book is two things merging: what you bring to the book and what the book brings to you. 

  • I didn’t think an essay about friendship would stick with me as much as one did this week titled “Grown Women Don’t Need A ‘Best Friend’.” It stems from Emily Gould’s recently released book about adult/millennial friendships but delves into why it’s okay not to have a “best friend” if you’re an adult woman. I related a lot, and I appreciated — and believe — in the idea of different levels of closeless when it comes to my friendships. 

  • Zadie Smith wrote an essay for Oprah about the notion of summer reading and, at heart of the piece, is the notion that there’s such a thing as being addicted to books and reading. It’s a beautiful piece. 

Last week I mentioned the “get organized” series kicking off on tumblr, and a few people have chimed in to talk about the ways they organize their lives, as well as their to-read piles:

If you want to join in, I know I’d be interested. Just write about how you organize, then send it along via the tag “#get organized” on tumblr or send it my way and I’ll share it. 

Reading Report Card: 6 Months into 2014

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Last year in December, I took a look at what I’d read that year and broke it down into quantifiable categories. Was I reading more debuts than the year before? Was I reading more male writers than female writers? What about the sort of diversity I was reading, either in terms of authors of color or stories featuring a main character of color?

I’ve noted this has been a slower reading year for me, and because of that, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at my reading at the half-way point of 2014 and see where I have been and figure out what, if anything, I should be doing better in the second half of the year. As of writing this post, I’ve read 45 books, or about two books per week. I did not include any of the manuscripts I’ve read this year (probably between 8 and 10) but rather, books that are available now or will be available before the end of the year.

The entire list of my titles read with how I categorized them is accessible here, if you’re curious. I had planned on looking at genre as a key part of my breakdown, but I read mostly realistic fiction for many reasons, and it wasn’t surprising that was the bulk of this year’s titles already.

Book Audience and Format 



Let’s look first at the types of books I’m reading in terms of who the general audience is:

One thing I’ve wanted to do is read more adult books, and I don’t think this is too bad so far. 

So far, I’ve read 7 adult books this year and 38 YA books. Of the adult books, one title was non-fiction and of the YA books, one title was non-fiction (or rather, it’s a collection of poetry and images, which I’d categorize under non-fiction, rather than fiction in terms of it being like a novel).

Since I’m on format with this, might as well get a look at where my format reading is so far.

The majority of my reading has been fiction this year. I’ve read 2 graphic novels, one novel in verse, a poetry collection, and one non-fiction title. I separated the last two out in this chart, as opposed to the chart above.
I think I’d like to try to sneak in a little more non-fiction reading this year. Last year, I got to read so much non-fiction, and this year, I have not been reading it much at all. The title I did read was danah boyd’s It’s Complicated, about teens and their use of technology and the internet. I think picking more titles up in that realm is a goal I’ve got before the end of the year. 
Books by Gender of Author and Main Character
So what about gender? This is of particular interest to me this year with the “Year of Reading Women” campaign. Do I tend toward more female authors or male authors? I haven’t been keeping tabs on this this year or spent a lot of time being conscious of this on purpose. 

Out of the 45 books I read, there were 47 authors writing them.

I read more females than males this year, roughly 80% to 20%.

And how that translates in terms of the gender of the main characters of the books I’ve read this year:

This breakdown was very tricky. Part of it was because I had to identify “main character” when the novel was told from more than one point of view. I decided if it was only 2 points of view, I could count both. If it was more than two, I threw it into a catch-all “cast of characters” category; in this instance, all four of those titles featured both male and female voices. The not applicable category went to my poetry collection and the non-fiction title, which didn’t have a dominant main character voice (though the poetry collection is geared toward female readers). 
The numbers here show I read more female main characters than male (32 compared to 6). Of those female characters, four of the books I read featured 2 female characters each. Interestingly, I haven’t read a title this year yet that features two male main characters, but I have read 5 titles that feature a male and a female main character. 

Publication Year and Publication Debut


It has been a very slow year for debut novel reading for me. I haven’t been seeing as many pop up, and I’ve definitely not been seeing as many review copies pop up on Edelweiss nor in my mailbox that are debut or speak to me. It may be the case there are many more debut genre novels this year than in the past, which I am less inclined to read than realistic debuts.

Hre’s how the debut vs. not a debut titles look. I define debut in the purest sense: first book, period. I don’t care if they wrote an adult novel before or self-published a book before. I only looked at debut novels from 2014 — if a novel was a debut from another year, I did not include it.

Maybe it’s not as bad as I thought.  Almost 20% of the titles I read were debut novels. I’d like to amp that up in the second half of the year, but it’s better than I expected.
I looked, too, at the publication year of the books I’m reading, in order to get a sense of how much backlist I’m reading. Of the 45 books I’ve read, 6 were not published in 2014. As of this writing, the book I’m reading and the one following it are backlist, which should help those numbers a bit at the end of the year. 
Likewise, I looked at the series vs. not a series titles I’ve read. Of the 45 books, only 4 were from a series. And actually, calling those four books series titles is true, but three of them are stand alone series titles: Biggest Flirts by Jennifer Echols, Dirty Wings by Sarah McCarry, and To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before by Jenny Han can all be read alone, without context from previous/forthcoming titles. Sex Criminals I threw into the series category, though. I know I can pick up the single volumes, but I prefer my graphic novels in a larger edition, so I’ll be waiting eagerly for the second volume here.

Diversity


One thing I have paid far more attention to with my reading this year has been diversity. I don’t like making specific reading goals, since I think it can kill my reading interests, but I have been very conscious of reading more books written by or featuring main characters of color. Talking about these books is important to me, and I’ve been trying to be better at highlighting them.

Out of the 45 titles I’ve read, I looked at a general breakdown of the books either written by or featuring a character of color. Some of these books have overlap to them — Pointe by Brandy Colbert, for example, is written by and features a person of color — but I kept the tally for it at one. In this count, I included Nina LaCour’s Everything Leads to You because the main character’s racial makeup, while not at the forefront of the story, is important.

More than 1/4 of the books I read were written by or featured main characters of color. I think this is better than in past years, and what’s maybe more interesting to me is that increasing that number has not been hard. I don’t make to-read lists or get fussy about what order I read books in. I make a tall stack and go as the interest reaches me. Reaching for more diverse titles has not been a challenge in the least. Maybe the hardest part is what comes before that though — learning what those books are and seeking them out.

I think that’s the real battle we’ll keep having. Once they’re accessible, they’re a lot easier to pick up and talk about.

It seemed worthwhile to look at sexuality in terms of diversity in my reading, too. How many books featured non-straight characters, either as a main part of the story or as a part of the character’s identity, regardless of how it wove into the greater narrative. Out of 45 books, four featured non-straight characters for me so far. Those four include Everything Leads to You, One Man Guy, Grasshopper Jungle, and Far From You. Two of those books feature bisexual characters, on features a lesbian main character, and one features a gay character.

The Second Half of 2014


I don’t like goals, like I said before, but I think in looking at my breakdowns, I know where I can be a better reader. I know, too, where I’d like to be a better reader. Seeing the quantitative breakdowns helps shape my thinking about reading and where/what I could be a better advocate for, as well. It’d probably be beneficial to look at what the breakdown of titles reviewed here is, too: am I talking up enough diverse titles? Could I do better at it?

I’m hoping to blow past 100 books before 2014 rolls to an end, and I don’t think that’s an impossible goal.

I’m curious to hear from you: what have you seen with your reading this year? Any interesting or noteworthy trends? Have you had any favorite reads that surprised you or you think other people should know about and read? Lay it on me!

What I’m Reading Now

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Fairest: Volume 2 by Lauren Beukes and Volume 3 by Sean E. Williams
These
spinoffs of the popular Fables comics are very hit and miss with me.
Volume 2 is about Rapunzel and is pretty solid. It features Rapunzel
traveling to Japan in search of her lost baby twins, whom she had been told
died at birth. Rapunzel believes otherwise. We get some interesting
background on Rapunzel’s past in the Japanese version of Fabletown, and
the story is certainly different from anything I’ve read before. I can’t
say I loved it, but it was fun.

Volume 3 introduces a
new female character, Nalayani, and is set on the Indian subcontinent.
The Fairest stories are ostensibly about the women from the Fables
universe, but this story, disappointingly, truly belongs to Prince Charming, who has come
back to life and assumed the role of Maharajah. While Charming became
somewhat interesting as a character before he died in Fables, he’s
literally the worst in this volume. This Goodreads review
pretty much sums up my feelings about this installment. It seems like
the writers were trying to show how Charming changes thanks to his love
for Nalayani, but to me, it just seems like he’s gotten pushier and more
misogynistic, undoing his growth from the previous arc. Not a stellar
addition (but beautiful, as always).

Rat Queens: Volume 1 by Kurtis J. Wiebe and Roc Upchurch
This
graphic novel for adults is a stunner. It features a group of female
mercenaries (one of them a dwarf) with varying backgrounds, body types,
skin colors, and personalities who are sent on a quest in order to avoid
going to jail for wreaking havoc on the town they live in. It’s fun,
funny, raunchy, and smart. The best comics are able to create
interesting characters and relationships in a small amount of space, and
that’s precisely what Rat Queens does. Highly recommended, particularly for comics readers who are searching for those elusive books where women are treated as people (or, you know, dwarves).
 

The Tyrant’s Daughter by J. C. Carleson
I’m listening to this one on audio and really enjoying it so far. Fifteen year old Laila has just moved to a suburb of Washington, D. C. with her mother and little brother after her father, the king/dictator of a fictional middle eastern country, was killed in a coup. So far, the book has focused on Laila’s experiences as an immigrant and the beginnings of her realization that her father, whom she regarded as a great ruler, was regarded as a tyrant by the rest of the world – or at least by her new friends in the United States. The book’s synopsis promises a bit of international intrigue later on, which I’m looking forward to. Narrator Meera Simhan voices Laila with a light accent that lends authenticity to the story.

Illusive by Emily Lloyd-Jones
This YA debut is about a group of teens with special powers who run heists. The protagonist has the ability to change her appearance, hence the title, a clever mashup of illusion and elusive. This book is so perfect for me, it’s like the author took a trip through my brain, collecting bits and pieces of the things I like and putting them all in a book. It’s an incredibly fun read. I want more heist novels for teens!

Conversion by Katherine Howe

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I loved Conversion, Katherine Howe’s first foray into young adult territory, more than most of what I’ve read so far this year. The parallels she draws are insightful without hitting the reader over the head with them. She’s also done a fine job of getting at what it’s like to be under the kind of extraordinary pressure that might cause conversion disorder in these teenage girls.

Colleen Rowley is a senior at an elite all-girls private Catholic school in Danvers, Massachusetts, the site of the former Salem Village. She’s in competition with another classmate for valedictorian, is interviewing for admittance to Harvard, and has just started a flirtation-maybe-something-more with a boy who goes to a nearby school. She’s under a lot of pressure, but she feels like she can handle it.

Then her classmates start getting sick. One of them exhibits strange verbal tics. Another loses all of her hair. Another – one of Colleen’s close friends – coughs up pins. There doesn’t seem to be a common thread among their symptoms. More and more girls begin getting sick, and the situation quickly snowballs. Different diagnoses are given, some girls go on television to share their stories, and the media is a constant presence at the school. In her author’s note, Howe explains that the succession of hypotheses she describes in her book for the illnesses (from Tourette’s to PANDAS to environmental causes) very closely mirrors the case of Le Roy, NY from 2011.

Scattered throughout the book are chapters set in early 1700s Salem, narrated by Ann Putnam as she gives her confession for her part in the Salem witch trials several years earlier. (Putnam was the only person involved to confess.) It’s clear that the bulk of the story belongs to Colleen, but these sections set in the past are made more powerful for their brevity. Ann describes her initial reticence to go along with the girls who first started making accusations, but slowly, slowly, she gets caught up and becomes a primary accuser, even legitimately experiencing some of the physical symptoms she only pretended to have before. It’s easy for the reader, too, to become caught up. We read about the heady feeling Ann gets when she realizes that this time, the adults – the men, mostly, but the women too – are listening to her, really listening. That this time, her words have power.
             
And this is where the story holds its real power, too: what will teenage girls do when faced with the pressure they experience? When they’re pressured to excel academically, spiritually, and socially, but also told to be “good” and “pure” and given no power to act on their own or be heard with their own voices? It’s easy to say that we’ve come a long way since the 17th/18th centuries in the way teen girls are treated, but that type of pressure? Girls – and particularly girls – in the here and now experience it just as Howe’s version of Ann Putnam did 300 years ago. When written in this way, the parallel is obvious.

It was easy for me to relate to Colleen, which is unusual for me to write. There are many reasons I tend not to read contemporary realistic YA, but one of the primary ones is that I don’t find many that are authentic to my experience. Not that they need to be – I certainly want to read about people different from me. But there’s something to be said for reading about an experience similar to yours, and I could easily relate to Colleen’s, even though I didn’t attend a Catholic high school and never interviewed at Harvard. I felt the same kind of intense academic pressure to succeed, even finding myself in competition for a top ranking. These things matter very little now, but at the time, they held paramount importance. I felt tremendous academic pressure while at the same time worrying about my hair, my skin, my weight, and yes, my inability to speak and be heard about any of it, my feelings that my words were lesser and my concerns were lesser.

The full impact of the story is weakened slightly by a detail at the very end, involving the yellow bird from the cover. I feel like it undermines the parallels Howe draws between the two events and adds a hint of manufactured creepiness that isn’t necessary. I’m being deliberately vague since I know most of you won’t have read the book yet, but I’d be interested to hear if those of who have read it agree with me in this respect. Events wrap up fairly quickly near the end, too – Colleen tells us which college she’s going to, who made valedictorian, and so on. It feels rushed, almost like Howe was checking things off her list.

Those things aren’t huge problems, though, and they don’t prevent the book from being a standout. Howe’s author’s note is a must-read, if only for the reason that she explains she used some of Ann Putnam’s own words in the story. It adds historical authenticity and drives home the point that the girls then and the girls now aren’t that different – and that we don’t treat them all that differently.


Review copy picked up at TLA. Conversion is available now.