Welcome back to Cover Snark!
From Dena: My mom is on an alien book kick and showed us this cover. Between the title and the cover, we were all cracking up. He’s SO BLUE. The horns don’t poke out of the hat, they just kind of are shoved in there, apparently.
Sarah: First, the listing title must accompany the book: Whisked Away by the Alien: A Curvy Girl Hannukah Sci Fi Alien Romance
Second, setting aside the horns permanently, thanks, WHAT.
From the description: “Wait until this alien experiences Hanukkah with a Jewish family that doesn’t exactly know the meaning of privacy, even during Christmas time!”
What does that even mean?
I need to lie down now. This is officially too much.
THAT ISN’T EVEN A WHISK IT IS A SPOON ok, ok, I’m going to get some Tylenol.
This is hilariously weird.
Tara: What a chaotic gift this is.
Sarah: TARA it isn’t even a WHISK what are we even DOING here. Also I’ve had Tylenol so all is well.
Tara: I think that’s part of what I love! None of it makes sense!
Sarah: I…find myself being curious about what the alien is baking…
Tara: Oh, I am convinced there is nothing in that bowl, but the spoon.
Lara: It seems the scourge of the ‘tribal’ tattoo is an interplanetary thing.
Sneezy: I DIDN’T BUILD A KITCHEN IN SPACE JUST SO YOU CAN GET YOUR NIPPLES EVERYWHERE, JOHN!
PamG: I’m sending you this little gem in case you are tired of all the wolves and bears adorning these covers. Behold: Keanu Dracul gets the side-eye from the horse he stole hair from.
Sarah: You know that horse is thinking, “My dude, calm down and put your shirt back on. You’re scaring the ponies.”
Tara: The horse has certainly had a fright!
Lara: Even the horse’s mane is standing on end with fright. Also, what is going on with the horse’s legs?
Sneezy: DEMON HORSE! DEMON HORSE MISSING HALF THEIR CHEST!
Tara: I signed into Netgalley and this is the first thing I saw.
Sarah: And did you immediately sign back out?
Claudia: Frightening lol
Shana: Sometimes a person just likes to rip the head off a dinosaur. And sometimes that head is super sexy so they give its yellowed teeth long, lustful looks.
Sarah: I found an entire firm that does animatronic dragons and dinos. Think they can make one of these?
Sneezy: I always had an aversion to puke neon green. This cover makes me feel ill and vindicated.
From Kim D: Is he doing a comparison of their chests?
Sarah: Sometimes the cover models are looking at their crotches, often in surprise. This guy looks concerned:
Tara: Or is it because he’s just figuring out that they’re fused together?
Sarah: “Was that lube or…crazy glue?”
Elyse: Their navel rings got hooked together
Sarah: That is absolutely an “oh shit” look on his face, you’re right
Tara: This is not the one night to forever he was expecting.
Sneezy: The lighting makes him look like he has jaundice, and her like death microwaved.
For half a minute I was actually impressed there was a Hannukah romance that wasn’t just palate-swapped Christmas…and then “Wait until this alien experiences Hanukkah with a Jewish family that doesn’t exactly know the meaning of privacy, even during Christmas time!” hit me right in the optic nerves. The Great Blue Razzberry from Beyond the Stars is disappointed in your shallow attempt at cultural diversity.
I can’t even hate Stallion Shield, it reminds me of when my friends & I made *super serious professional* covers for our fanfictions. Although I would like to think we’d use a less anxious horse; that poor 3D boy has seen some things
Grounded Sky looks like the sort of computer game we would’ve been really excited to play on the GameCube. The flying animations are so almost-realistic, and your hand only partially clips through your dragon!
I can’t tell if the white guy with dreadlocks or the lady with ultraviolet hair is the alien pirate who is claiming the other, but I’m intrigued by the possibility it’s the latter
The blue alien has a tattoo on his left arm of which at first I wondered if it was elfish but on closer inspection I realized it is mirrored text ending in Love.
Could it be ‘Live Laugh Love’???
Unfortunately not. It’s ‘Live the live you love’. (And yes, I went to the trouble of finding a high resolution image of the cover, downloading it, mirroring it and zooming in. I just had to know)
Okay, the tattoo is not misspelled. That was my fault. I’m not a native English speaker and I keep mixing up ‘life’ & ‘live’.
So just to be 100% clear, it says ‘Live The Life You Love’.
Am I the only one getting “What We Do In The Shadows fanfic featuring Nandor and John” vibes from Stallion Sheild?
So wait, in the last cover it looks like the purple haired woman’s arm is melted into his hip?!?!! No wonder dude looks concerned!
@ -m- I love your commitment – thank you for solving the mystery of the weird alien tattoo
Ooooh, good catch, @-m- ! I didn’t run it through a processor, but holding a mirror up to it (and standing behind the monitor to look in the mirror, with the cover blown up a little, it appears to be wonderfully ornate script saying “Live Like You Love,” with all of the caps extremely embellished (well, the font is a highly embellished script, but the caps are particularly ornate).
I should’ve refreshed comments before posting; sorry for the added noise. 🙂
Is that the Star Trek font in the last one?!
Whisked Away by the Alien: Does the advertising blurb really spell it “Hannukah”? Ouch! Tara says: I am convinced there is nothing in that bowl, but the spoon. I say: It would make no difference anyway, because if you look closely you can see the spoon is just hovering over the bowl and can’t possibly be making contact with anything inside it. Oh, and there’s a reason chefs wear long-sleeved, high-necked jackets. That wee little apron is not going to protect alien’s bare skin from anything.
Are there canonical Hanukkah Colors? Are they red, white, blue and yellow?
And finally, my favorite rejoinder: I was so distracted by the {weirdness of the the main illustration} that I almost overlooked the {four distinct fonts}.
Stallion Shield: They make condoms for horses now? Oh, wait, not sheath. Shield. My bad. Why is the shirtless human man acting as a shield for the stallion? And is this a series? Ram Shield; Bull Shield; Tomcat Shield …
Grounded Sky: My eyes! …. Oh, the pain.
:: squinting cautiously ::
I want to see Clint’s Reptiles assessing the qualities of whatever-that-is as a pet, rating on a scale of one to five for Handleability, Initial Cost and so on.
Claimed by Illegible Jaggedness: The eternal question: are those brides for pirates, or female pirates who want to be brides? I’m a bit concerned about the cover artist’s palette; the purple seems to have bled into the bride’s hair and skin. Will it wash out?
You can tell he is an Alien because he doesn’t even know what a whisk is. The “horns” honestly makes him look like a mutant Tick (The cartoon character not insect) with tribal tattoos.
Also while I agree the cover is horrible on the last one. (Are they merging?) Tamsin Ley writes a pretty good tale.
@Julian, YES! I also immediately thought of the Tick when I saw that cover.
I have many questions:
I know why chefs cover their hair, but why does the alien need to cover his horns? And is his recipe Kosher?
What is he shielding the stallion from? Must be something scary to judge by the horse’s expression. Is one or the other of them about to be gelded?
What art director thought those colors went together? The rainbow dino is bad enough but that red hair…
And how can he be an effective pirate with No Atak?
I misread the second title as “Stallion Shied” which fits the horse’s expression very well.
I didn’t know a sky could fly at all, let alone be grounded.
It looks like the purple haired lady is falling asleep waiting for him to figure out how this should work.
I KNOW Stallion Shield is spelled right, but there’s just something in the kerning or all the fancy serifs that makes me think it’s wrong. And @Sneezy, that horse is not only missing half his chest, but everything from the withers back.
Is a Stallion Shield anything like a human shield? No wonder the poor horse is so freaked out.
Also, I’m not the only one who thinks the male model’s chest in the fourth cover looks a little … breasticaboobular, am I?
And @Louise: Another Clint’s Reptiles fan! *high-five* I too would like to see Clint rate that, um, creature. “When it comes to handleability, we give the Amorphous Grounded Sky Dragon Blob a score of … three out of five. If you can figure out which end is the correct one to pet, they are very friendly animals.”
@TMary – you are not the only one
what a motley medley of cover snark.
“Whisked”: does blue boy have scales on his hands, but not the rest of his skin, some of the rest of which looks oddly rough, like the surface of a sugar cube? Wouldn’t scales/sandpaper texture skin be hard to tattoo?
“Stallion”: that may be a life-size hobby horse, since the body appears to end at the withers. Are those pink bats flying around dude and horse, and if so, why? The facial expressions on this and “Whisked” make me wonder, again, why grumpy faces are supposedly attractive on men.
“Claimed by…”: I don’t think those dreads can be attached to the hairstyle on the top of his head. This cover reminds me of “Moonlighting”, where the heroine would be in soft focus, but everything else would be in normal focus.