Welcome back to Cover Snark! There are definitely certain elements taking center stage today.
From Karen: The Most Eligible Viscount in London by Ella Quinn (it’s a new book). As a whole, the cover is quite nice but I was struck by the very weird thumb on the hero’s hand. It looks like it would be longer than any of the other fingers. I think somebody did a very bad Photoshop and it’s kind of creepy. Her covers are frequently beautifully done by Jon Paul Ferrara but I don’t know who did this one.
Sarah: “Oooh, pretty…is the thumb weird?”
zooms in
“Yeah. The thumb’s weird.”
Claudia: It’s the thumb of doom!
Elyse: That’s right up there with the heroine with three hands.
Sarah: I cannot tell you how long I have been looking at my own hand trying to figure out if my thumb looks like that.
Elyse: Having met you, I can assure you it does not.
Sarah: I mean, maybe it does and my thumbs have grown since then?
Claudia: Zooming in also calls attention to the heroine’s strange neck pallor!
Lara: That pallor is REAL. I want to make a joke about his touch being as cold as ice… but his hand’s too pink to make it work.
Susan: I can’t remember if we’ve had this cover recently, or if this bear just gets a lot of work.
The way that child is lit and dressed looks a little Ghost of a Sad Victorian Child Haunting The Doll In Your Attic
Lara: That kid does not look as invested in her dad’s dating life as maybe she could be. Or rather, maybe she IS invested and would just prefer someone that is NOT YOU.
Sarah: This is giving me all the creeps.
Amanda: The face the girl is making me gives me “Ain’t I a stinker” vibes. Bet she lured the bear there to get back at some snotty step parent.
From Lils: The hair is just too much…..plus, it looks like he was compressed, removing half his torso to fit the cover. Bonus veins.
Sarah: I will say, I have had that feeling when I have a really fun idea but usually I have a shirt.
Also his nipple is looking at me.
Amanda: The more I look at it, the more smushed he seems.
Elyse: Someone needs a medicated shampoo.
Lara: He needs that shampoo STAT because growing a crown of antler-thorns is not okay by any means.
Dee: Color me surprised when this showed up as a recommendation on Kindle. I knew I had to share it as cover snark when the friend I sent it to said “There’s something about that man’s body that frightens me. His abs look like eclairs, Dee!”
And I did not buy it. I put a hard no on psychopaths.
Sarah: He’s very dehydrated. Very. Maybe he’s not a psychopath, clean or otherwise. He’s really cranky because he’s so freaking thirsty.
Elyse: He’s a phlebotomist’s dream though
Amanda: I, personally, have great veins for blood draws and I’m proud of that.
Sneezy: I want eclairs.
Sarah: Me too.
Lara: Is he…pouting? Or is that strain of some kind? His face is just so… tight. Also, let’s make that three eclairs
Sneezy: Let’s get three dozen to start. We all deserve it.
Lara: You’re so right, Sneezy! Eclairs for all!
Sneezy: does the Eclairs Dance to “It’s Raining Men”.
The Ella Quinn book looks like it’s made of at least two different pictures smooshed together. I’d guess that originally, the lady was sitting on the sofa without anyone behind her, and Viscount Oddthumb was dropped in afterwards. The way she’s lit is different to him, and there’s no shadow under his hand like you’d expect there to be. Unless of course she’s got an internal light source, like a novelty lamp.
Don’t mind the fae one, but yeah, vein guy looks like he needs a nice drink of water. Oh, and the title – brings back happy memories of when I discovered layer styles & special filter effects in Photoshop and used every damn one of them at the same time.
The last title looks like it’s spelled out in Mylar balloons.
I blame Nalini Singh for my new susceptibility to bear shifters, but I prefer her tiny gangsters to that scary child.
Okay. It must be said. Size matters, especially if a man knows what to do with his hands…err…thumb.
Maybe that bear is caught in a horror novel? That creepy kid needs to go back to haunting the closet. Just sayin’…
Now I’m wondering if fae men have to worry about Male Pattern Baldness because combing what hair he has into a Mohawk? And the spikes could get a little dangerous when/if he ever gets down to serious business…
(Why yes, I DO have to write a sexy scene today, why do you ask?)
As for Mylar-Dude (thanks Ren/Lena!), his abs remind me of the aliens from Robert A. Heinlien’s “The Puppet Masters.” You know the ones, those sort of armored stingray looking critters that attach to the human body?
LisaM, tiny gansters FTW! Nalini’s Russian bears have spoiled me for all other bear shifters!
Romance novels that feature little girls on the cover always give me a weird/icky vibe. The look on that girl’s face seems to be saying, “Ha! You think you’re going to date my hot single Dad? Oh, I’m going to make your life hell—and he’s never going to believe you when you tell him what terrible things his sweet little girl has been saying to you. And, yes, I did go through your bag and take twenty dollars from your purse.”
Cover 1: She is disturbingly pale, his thumb is weird, and furniture is shaped like a love seat, yet appears to be enormous.
Cover 2: Notice how the bear’s fur matches the little girl’s hair? I think that’s ex/girl’s mother, fleeing for the hills.
Cover 3: “Do you suffer from scalp flames? Ask your doctor or pharmacist about…”
Cover 4: Does anyone think psychopaths are romantic? His abdomen looks more like a carapace. Spelling “Dirty Psychopath” in mylar balloons is festive in a very discordant way.
Along with being pale, the lady doesn’t seem all that impressed with the Most Eligible Viscount.
The “single dad” bear dude is also on the cover of Solitary Man
(Smith Brothers #3)
by Sherilee Gray
I first read Cover 2 as ‘Singe Dad’ which gives it a different spin. But agree that disapproving daughter gives me jitters.
That little girl is clearly thinking, “Try to date my dad and I will sic my friend the bear on you.”
@Fae Consort, I’ve had headaches like that.
Psychopath guy looks as if his veins and his abs are in a race to see which bursts out of his body first. It’s like Scanners-era Cronenberg wrote a romance novel.
That viscount’s thumb looks upside down…
Cover 1 – He is smooshing her down into the sofa and it’s weirdly deep and smooshy, especially given what I know about antique sofas (not remotely smooshy – horsehair is hard, people.)
Cover 2 – I think the bear is what the nasty smug child shifts into., and they are all way too proud about that.
Cover 3 – I did not think the fae had frat parties but I guess they do now and that guy is the president of the frat and a jackass who is 100% sure no means yes, and yes means anal.
Cover 4 – I just feel kinda sorry for him?
Don’t write off psychopaths until you’ve tried the Necessary Evils series by Olney James.
So many questions, so few answers…
The Most Eligible Viscount in London: Before getting to the thumb–yup, that’s weird–I was especially struck by the colors. If I, personally, were wearing that shade of purple, I would go to great lengths not to get near anything in that shade of teal. (There’s a story about the Empress Josephine, or someone like her, inviting a lady to sit beside her on a blue sofa, knowing it would highlight her own white dress but would make the other’s green dress look horrid.) On the other hand, you can tell it isn’t a dyed-in-the-wool snarkable cover, because the fonts match, and everything is legible.
Single Dad / Match Mate: Uh, is part of that a series title and the other part the individual title? Which is which? And how does our wilderness man-bear get to the barber on a regular basis to remain so cleanly coiffed? And, finally, what does the badge say? Does the sheriff’s department have an elite Special Bear Forces division, and if so, does it consist entirely of bear shifters, or is it tasked with hunting bear( shifter)s?
Fae’s Consort: Better Fae than me, is all I can say.
DIRTY Illegible Scrawl: Just one question: WHO had a meeting and decided that was a marketable title?
@Gail: so, of course, I had to fall down the Olney James rabbit hole, where I not only added a bunch of books by a new-to-me author to my tbr, but also discovered there’s an adult coloring book based on her Elite Protection Series! Oh, brave new world that has such people in it!
Having lived with a manipulative, abusive liar, I can absolutely write off psychopath/anti-social personality disorder characters as “heroes” or “heroines”. I have no desire to see happy endings for people like my ex, or to be reminded.
Why is the sofa frame gray on one side of her, and brown on the other?
That last one. Oh, boy. Are we romanticizing mental illness, or are we just throwing around “psychopath” to mean “bad boy is overused”
That’s gonna be a hard NO from me
psychopath’s tat is in a weird place on his abdomen, so it just looks smudged.
fae’s crown of flames makes him a cousin of the Heat Miser.
@kay_blue: I did check out DIRTY PSYCHOPATH (because, reasons) and it starts out in an institution of some sort where the heroine works as a volunteer; there’s at least one doctor she’s afraid of—he’s very powerful and mistreats his patients (one of whom appears to be the hero). I assume at some point, the hero is going to take the heroine captive because one of the trigger warnings at the beginning of the book was “Stockholm Syndrome.” The Bitchery knows I read plenty of dark romance, but the few pages of DIRTY PSYCHOPATH I read were poorly-written and slap-dash—nothing about it made me want to keep reading. So, in this case, we can probably judge a book by its cover.
@DiscoDollyDeb I’ll go for dark romance but I’m gonna draw the line at fetishizing being institutionalized and abused so that we can justify calling the hero a degrading insult leveled at the mentally ill. Bad writing is just the gross cherry on top of the nasty sundae.
Thank you for investigating, you’re truly a hero.
I saw the fae one and the song, “I’m mister heat meister…” from that Claymation Christmas special is now an ear worm. Damn it.
And I hope the child actor from the old black and white movie, “The Bad Seed,” is getting royalties for that image. I know it isn’t her, but the dress, the attitude, the hair are all reminders of her in that role.
Single Dad – His left arm/shoulder looks weird. I don’t think they belong to him!
And he looks like a mashup of Wilmer Valderama and Joey Lawrence. Whoa!!
I fear that all the men on this set of covers need some good bra support. Single Dad has full-on boobage, for heaven’s sake!