A Cover is Not the Book

Flying back from a Baltic Sea Cruise in May, I watched Mary Poppins Returns. I was struck by “A Cover is Not the Book,” a song that reminds us that we have to look inside to see what a book is really about. The central message is that you can’t judge people by superficial appearances and actions, but the lyrics are also true for books.

Look at the covers from different printings of Wuthering Heights. As you probably know, the main plot is Heathcliff’s jealousy and quest for revenge. Yes, there is a love story between Heathcliff and Catherine, but that is merely the backdrop for the primary one. The landscape is the wild English moor of the 18^th and early 19^th centuries, and there is nothing simple or idyllic about it. Neither is it moonlike. To me, none of these covers portray the contents of the book.

That isn’t an unusual fail, however. Most cover designers don’t read the book, and the author doesn’t always have approval rights over the design the publisher chooses.

But cover designs can fail even when they are within the author’s control. It happened with my middle-grade historical novel Desert Jewels. The book is about the Japanese-American incarceration during the first years of World War II, but after it was published I was told that the girl on the cover was Chinese rather than Japanese. Which only goes to prove the old adage . . .

You can’t judge a book by its cover.

Book Cover Fail

I hate it when book covers misrepresent the contents.

My first middle-grade historical, Desert Jewels, is about the Japanese-American incarceration during World War II. So of course I wanted the cover to be historically accurate. And since the book is about an ethnic group I don’t belong to, I also wanted to make sure that I didn’t promote any stereotypes or do anything else that the Japanese-American community might find offensive.

I failed. I haven’t heard any complaints from the Japanese-American community yet, but I’ve been told that the girl on the cover is Chinese, not Japanese. When a Caucasian woman said that about a week ago, I puckered my brow and said, “but she looks a lot like some of the girls and women in Dorothea Lange’s pictures from that time.” (See the two photos below for a sample, and imagine them both in profile.)

Since the comment came from another Caucasian, I was inclined to brush it off as mistaken. But then I remembered an earlier response from a Chinese-American friend.

Several weeks before the book came out, I showed a proof copy to my writers’ group. Helena said, “Oh, I see you have an Oriental girl on the cover.” She suggested a change to the back-cover copy but didn’t tell me that the girl was Chinese, so I didn’t think anything about it. Or not much, anyway. I did have an uneasy feeling that the way she said “Oriental girl” meant something, but I didn’t ask about it at the time.

But I saw Helena on Saturday, so this time I asked. Helena said yes, the girl was Chinese, but many people confused Japanese and Chinese and Koreans. I asked if the cover was a problem, and she said no. But although Helena thinks it’s no big deal, it is a big deal to me. And I still don’t know how the Japanese-American community will react.

Knowing my shortcomings as an observer, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at my error when viewing this design. Despite being Caucasian, I can’t tell someone of Italian descent from someone of English descent. And I expect a lot of variety within any ethnic group. After all, my mother had 100% German ancestry but her brown hair and eyes didn’t fit Hitler’s ideal of a blond-haired blue-eyed Aryan race. (Thankfully her beliefs didn’t, either.)

There is one thing I did right. My book cover designer gave me one alternative that included a drawn or computer-generated image highlighting all the stereotypical features, and I rejected it immediately for that reason. But I didn’t realize that the option I did choose got the ethnicity wrong.

At this point, I can’t afford to change the cover, so I’ll have to live with it.

But I wish I’d gotten it right.

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Dorothea Lange took both pictures in 1942 as part of her official duties as an employee of the United States government. Because they are government documents, the photos are in the public domain.