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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