Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Those Girly Book Covers

Karen Heller has an axe to grind. In fact, she'd like to take an axe to some of the women's literature she's seen with these froo-frooey covers.

Heller cites Katie Crouch's Girls in Trucks as an example. The "debut novel about Southern debs gone bad is winsome. Crouch possesses a deft comic voice, a gift for observation, and the ending is free from the prince-saves-heroine gimmick of much chick lit," Heller writes. However, she says the cover "is literal and beyond cliche, the obligatory back of a woman in a vintage gown, barefoot on a blurry country road, a truck in the background. In a time of innovative design, the cover is visual Splenda."

"This isn't a great time for publishers," Heller notes. "If they would banish the uniform covers, which were stale from the get-go, and realize that women--who buy an awful lot of books--will buy ones without pink or shoes or severed body parts on the cover, they might sell a good deal more copies."

I know I'm turned off by ultra-fem cliche covers. My favorite genre is hardboiled mystery. And you don't see Lifetime channel-type images on the covers of hardboiled crime fiction--even when it is written by women.

So what gives? When will "women authors" be treated as simply "authors" in the wacky world of literary fiction?

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