Hello there! I know it’s everyone’s favorite day: Cover Snark Day! Pour yourself some coffee or tea and settle in, though do avoid taking a sip while reading.
Pam G: In the words of the inimitable Bernadette Peters (and only justification for the movie Pink Cadillac): “Looks like a penis. . . only smaller.”
Sarah: She looks very disappointed.
Or did she just tell him to turn his head and cough?
Amanda: I love the comforting hand on his shoulder.
Sarah: “Oh, honey.”
CarrieS: “In my defense, dear, it is very cold out here.”
From @Kelly_Instalove on Twitter.
RHG: There are so many levels of bad in the mess
Sarah: I cannot even. I can only prime. Prime myself to slap that book to the moon, with no return.
RHG: How about the sun? That’s way it’ll burn up,never to be seen again.
Elyse:
Amanda: He definitely skips leg day.
RHG: He removed a lower rib or three.
Sarah: Do people not know Islam…never mind. I’ve already put too much thought into this.
RHG: The sheikh thing is sooooooo…so.
RHG: Uh.
Elyse: WTF is going on here
RHG: UM
NO
NOPE
Nu huh.
Elyse: This is…
RHG: NOPE
Elyse: Like a bunch of people looked at this, right? Multiple people approved this? No one raised their hand and said “Hey, guys…?”
Amanda: “A single dad brother’s best friend police officer romance.”
Sarah: I know what those words mean individually. But together in that order I am confused.
Amanda: Is she breastfeeding?
Sarah: He looks like he is insistent and she doesn’t know how to tell him that it won’t work.
RHG: Kallen?
CarrieS: Has a faint resemblance to Christopher Lambert in the Highlander – but when it comes to the Highlander, there can be only one, and it’s not this guy.
On a Knight for Kallen, what IS that on the guy? If either model actually has that lump, they need to get to a doctor immediately.
I’ve come to appreciate titles like Police Officer’s Princess: A Single Dad, Brother’s Best Friend, Police Officer Romance (A Man Who Knows What He Wants Book 31) for their repellent properties. Saves me a lot of browsing time knowing up front which suite of tactics is behind a book.
There’s a KDD today subtitled “a gripping psychological thriller with a surprising twist,” just in case somebody needs “psychological thriller” helpfully defined for them in the title.
lol remember the good ol’ days when the only unnecessary title irritant was “: A Novel”
Let us not forget the glories of ‘A Fictional Novel’, Ren.
I thought the first book was called Winters Wheat not Winters Heat – but then again maybe it is.
“the bittersweet tale of an overzealous male lacatation consultant and the chieftain’s daughter who loved him”
I think I’m more bothered by the redundancy of the second title than anything else on that cover.
@Lostshadows: I tried to mentally fix that, and now I can’t stop singing this Alvin and the Chipmunks classic:
All I want for Christmas is my two front sheiks
My two front sheiks
See my two front sheiks
Gee, if I could only have my two front sheiks
Then I could wish you, “Merry Christmas”
Two front sheiks might be a little bit of a different story, but it would fix the title, and that’s what’s important.
Looks like the Knight’s mullet is eating his back. Also, might he actually be preggers? Cuz it seems like his tummy is kind of poking out.
Also, on a totally unrelated (except in a Fibber McGee’s closet kind of way)do any of you SBs do fencing or SCA, and do you know whether it’s even possible to draw a sword from a scabbard slung in the middle of one’s back? If so, how is that efficient? Do you need extra arm joints? This question has been troubling me for a while.
Perhaps Winter’s Heat guy is about to respond à la Crocodile Dundee: That’s not a penis. *whips sword from behind his back* THAT’S a penis!
I though it was Winter’s Wheat until reading these comments. Ah well, once you see the the rest of them, it looks rather tame. These naked men always remind me of those early illustrations of buffalo or hippopotamus. As if the artists don’t really know what a man looks like without a shirt on, but have read some travellers’ descriptions.
@ PamG I just went to a presentation where that question came up and the answer was no, it’s not possible/practical to carry a sword on your back and draw it, for exactly the reasons you’d expect 🙂
The couple on A KNIGHT FOR KALLEN look like they were pulled out of a cosplay convention where they were posing as John Snow and Daeneryls Targaryen when someone thought “I know! A romance cover moment!”
Can we talk about why the little girl on “Police Officer’s Princess” is wearing 3D glasses and eating popcorn? What is she about to see?!
@Winter’s Heat: “Um, darling, when I was talking about birth control I meant my chastity belt, I did n’t mean for you to pull out your sword for a DYI vasectomy.”
I think maybe the sheik is a genie and he’s in process of coming out of the lamp, that’s why he –sort of — tapers off? You’re right, Sarah, this is wrong on so many levels.
@Alex, maybe Mr Policeman isn’t sufficiently 3D on his own? I’m more concerned that he’s a) taking his shirt off b) presumably in a movie theater c) with a preteen girl. Talk about levels of wrong.
“Listen, Kallen! Our baby is kicking!” Nice of him to do the timeshare thing with the pregnancy, but the rest of him looks drastically shortened somehow. Did they squish him to make sure his kilt got on the cover? Is that why they made him slouch like that, because he was too tall to fit?
Ok, I clicked on the Amazon link for the last cover, and according to the blurb, the heroine’s full name is “Kallen de Mangeron.” So I think breast-feeding is the right image. “Num, num, Kallen, let’s eat!” (Even better since the book seems to be set in England, and you remember that the English aristocracy of the time were basically French speaking.) One wonders how Kallen’s family earned their sobriquet!
Are these cover models having their ribs removed to get those wasp waists?
There are three books in Leslie North’s “For Christmas” series and they all look geared to readers who like some crazy sauce with their spiked eggnog. The cover Sheikh is a counter-terrorism expert and language expert, and maybe a genie, if EC Spurlock has guessed correctly. The heiress heroine is described as having “unexpected intelligence” in the book blurb. sigh
The Police Officer’s Princess cover is wrong in so many ways. Like Alex, I am wondering about those 3-D glasses and the popcorn. Maybe someone needs to call the real police or Child Protective Services.
The Lady on the Winter’s Heat / Winter’s Wheat is checking out the bedazzling job she did on her warrior. (Needs a little more bling on top, she thinks.) No hero would have less than a saber under his smallclothes.
Who thinks it’s ok to put a grown man and little girl on the cover of a romance novel so that it looks like they’re the romance?
Anyone?
OMG.
Wow. This is a particularly deserving group of covers for Cover Snark. I’m just….no. No no no no no. The only good part about these are the comments and Elyse’s pics. Gorgeous.
Is that *another* Highlander romance at the top? What – what *is* it with Highlander romances? Why are they soo common?
And why do the designers of these covers always seem to think that Scottish Highlander men would have perfect tans and go around with their shirts off, showing off their perfect tans? Earth calling cover artists: IT IS BOTH VERY, VERY CLOUDY, AND VERY, VERY COLD IN THE SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS.
@Lostshadows: Yes, the redundancy of the second cover’s title bothered me so much that I couldn’t even look at the guy on it at first. Then I looked and…um…I’d rather go back to being bothered by the redundancy of the second cover’s title. Ick.
Also, I know people from the Middle East have many different looks and there’s no one “Arab” look, and I’m not an expert on what that would even be anyway, but…is it me or does he look exactly like any average WASP from America?
3rd cover: OH GOSH NO BAD WRONG STOP HELP ACK
*heavy breathing*
A single dad brother’s best friend police officer romance. Whatever that is, it is a very specific category of book. Is it a romance between a single dad and his brother’s best friend, who are both police officers? And why’s the little girl comfortably in the middle of it eating popcorn and wearing 3D…I should stop my brain from thinking now.
@PamG That very question became A Thing on the interwebs in the wake of the scene in the Wonder Woman movie where Diana carries her sword down the back of her evening gown. See for example this story from Buzzfeed. Results seem to have been mixed, but at least some people demonstrated that the sword could be drawn (possibly depending on the length of the blade and your arms).
I thought the dude on the Christmas Sheikh cover is the one wishing for a Sheik? My guess based on above speculation: cover dude an atheist genie that is friends with that Reindeer shifter guy and decided to still ask for a favor from his besties’ employer?
In the Sheikh cover:
I was trying to avert the totally wrong proportions, when my eyes found that little Xmas tree on the top right.
And I immediatly wondered if that was going to go on his penis for a sort of naked singing telegram or something.
My keyboard is really happy you posted the warning about liquids.
@Kathy:
“As if the artists don’t really know what a man looks like without a shirt on, but have read some travellers’ descriptions.”
Thank you! I finally understand where the men in these covers come from. Thank you!
The spindly arms coupled with the overbroad chest on Winter’s wHeat definitely smacks of Kathy’s source “illustrated from travelogue description”.
All I want for CHRISTMAS is a * for CHRISTMAS.
I feel certain that this author did not pick that title.
* [non-Christian Jimmy Kimmel stand in who’s missing ribs and will be at the gym 16 hours a day]
Creepy Pedo Cop BFF is part of a 47-book series. FORTY-SEVEN. I think you could do a month of Cover Snark on these. I submit “Bambino: A Secret Baby Mafia Romance”, “Budapest Billionaire’s Virgin (An older man/younger woman romance)”; and “Police Pooch and Smooch (A single dad/police officer romance” aka “A Man Who Knows What He Wants Book 25.”
Mind. Boggled.
Kallen is telling her knight about the awful dream she just had:
“I told the village witch I wanted a baby to come from a night of passion, but she showed me a vision of a baby erupting from someone’s stomach like a monster! Thank God it was only a drea … wait a minute …”
Winter’s Heat: He is obviously missing a few ribs and had surgery to get a waist that small, so out of proportion to his shoulders and hips.. And what is wrong with his left shoulder?
A Sheikh for Christmas: This man is obviously the same man as on Winter’s Heat. I can tell because he is also missing a few ribs and had to have surgery to have a waist that small, so out of proportion to his shoulders and hips. I think there is the basis for a jingle here. “All I want for Christmas is a Sheikh for Christmas, a sheik for Christmas” to the tune of “All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth.”
A Police Officer’s Princess: Why is the police officer stripping in front of the young girl? I trust she is not the love interest in this story. <> Who must be quite the spoiled brat to rate “princess.’ And what is going on with the red and blue and the blue and red? All ribs seem to be intact.
A Knight for Kallen: What is she, 12? I have restrained myself from making my usual comments about shirtless Highlanders out of doors but must mention this guy’s cloak seems woefully inadequate to the task of wrapping around his body. Wonder if he is missing any ribs? On the other hand, he looks about 7 months pregnant.
I recall watching Xena the warrior Princess pull her sword from behind her back and over her head several times.
@Maite, what little Christmas tree? I thought that was a bunch of mistletoe and was wondering where mistletow grows on the Arabian peninsula.
OKAY KALLEN, Time for dinner!!
I having been trying all day to think who the cop reminded me of….it finally dawned on me. That’s Telly Savalas. All that’s missing is the lollypop. And OMG, there’s a shirtless People cover. How did I ever miss that? Or maybe I suppressed the memory.
@Carol S: There is a mafia made up of secret babies? That might almost be entertaining.
Those single dad/policeman reads like one would really want a steady diet of m/m romances with a single dad dating a policeman. I would think there would be a limited appetite for that.
The woman on the Winters Heat cover is clearly a medical professional trying to figure out how to tell him that his left shoulder will never be reattached properly.
Oh.
She’s holding a tub of popcorn, so that’s her hand. At first glance I thought it was his–the grown man’s–hand cupping her prepubescent boob-to-be.
Whew.
I guess.
“A single dad brother’s best friend police officer romance” makes me think of that recurring CinemaSins gag along the lines of “actor’s reaction on first reading the screenplay accidentally makes it into the final script”. It’s a list of keywords and marketing categories that accidentally got used as the cover blurb.
Unless, that is, it’s a series title like “a {character-name} mystery”. Seems a bit of a mouthful, if so.
On the Winter’s Heat cover, is he going to chop off her head if she says the wrong thing? Is that why she looks so concerned? Although I think the sword is photoshopped. If he was really holding a sword with his arms at that angle surely it would be puncturing his pelvis.
I thought that there was a spellcheck fail and it was actually “All I Want For Christmas is a Christmas Shake” and it was about a bodybuilder looking for the seasonal protein shakes…
The Police Officer’s Princess looks like she wandered into a strip club by accident and the nice “policeman” is looking after her until her mother can come and get her. He’s made her popcorn and put on a Disney movie for her to watch. In the office.
And Kallen and her knight appear to be saying their farewells as he leaves on a quest to find manly clothing that features more than a loincloth and a furry cloak. Look carefully – she’s giving him a last boost of body heat. I hope the loincloth isn’t made from the leftovers from the cloak, ’cause that would just be *weird*.
I would read the hell out of a mafia of secret babies who, instead of human trafficking and drug and weapons smuggling, focused their organizational muscle on reproductive justice and safe havens, while occasionally (oops!) handling abusers by making offers they can’t refuse.
@SB Sarah
My brain pitches that as ” Orson and Olivia meets Rugrats “. Tall order.