The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

Title: The Nightingale


Author: Kristin Hannah

Type: Novel
Genre: Historical Fiction

Series: No

Pages: 440
Copyright:  2015

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Rating: 4 out of 5


Cover Rating: 4 out of 5
The cover of the book that I designed was of the apple tree in Vianne's yard. She tied fabric to the tree to remember each person that the war took from her. I thought having that as the cover would be interesting because it would be from the period of the war but not as dark as a war. The actual cover is simple, which I think was good. It was from the present time and showed the Eiffel tower through a rainy window with a rose bush and a nightingale in gold laid over the top. I thought it was elegant but dark.

 
Summary: from Good Reads
In love we find out who we want to be.
In war we find out who we are.

FRANCE, 1939

In the quiet village of Carriveau, Vianne Mauriac says goodbye to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the Front. She doesn’t believe that the Nazis will invade France...but invade they do, in droves of marching soldiers, in caravans of trucks and tanks, in planes that fill the skies and drop bombs upon the innocent. When France is overrun, Vianne is forced to take an enemy into her house, and suddenly her every move is watched; her life and her child’s life is at constant risk. Without food or money or hope, as danger escalates around her, she must make one terrible choice after another.

Vianne’s sister, Isabelle, is a rebellious eighteen-year-old girl, searching for purpose with all the reckless passion of youth. While thousands of Parisians march into the unknown terrors of war, she meets the compelling and mysterious Gäetan, a partisan who believes the French can fight the Nazis from within France, and she falls in love as only the young can...completely. When he betrays her, Isabelle races headlong into danger and joins the Resistance, never looking back or giving a thought to the real--and deadly--consequences.

With courage, grace and powerful insight, bestselling author Kristin Hannah takes her talented pen to the epic panorama of WWII and illuminates an intimate part of history seldom seen: the women’s war. The Nightingale tells the stories of two sisters, separated by years and experience, by ideals, passion and circumstance, each embarking on her own dangerous path toward survival, love, and freedom in German-occupied, war-torn France--a heartbreakingly beautiful novel that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the durability of women. It is a novel for everyone, a novel for a lifetime.

Feelings:
It took me a while to get into the book. It starts out in 1995 with a woman remembering the past and thinking about what we loose. She doesn't relish remembering but remembering becomes central to the story in a way that is heartbreaking. Once I got to Isabelle's point of view I found the story more engaging.

The back and forth between two time periods, 1995 (where the story is from a first person narrator) and WWII (where the story is told in third person)  gave the story an interesting feeling. I wasn't sure which sister was remember the war in 1995.

The novel was not one that I would consider uplifting but it had moments of happiness during the war even mixed in with the horrors. I would recomend this novel. Many novels I think that the cover adds something to the story but after seeing the cover on this I don't think it added anything to the story and I didn't feel like I was missing part of the story seeing it after finishing the novel.

I recommend this novel to readers who enjoy historical fiction and who like strong female characters.

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

Title: Outlander 
Author: Diana Gabaldon 
Type: Novel 
Genre: Fiction 
Series: Yes, Outlander #1 
Pages: 627 
Copyright: 1991 
Publisher: Delta Trade Paperbacks 
Rating: 4 out of 5


Cover Rating: 3 out of 5
I think that the simple cover is actually pretty nice. I'm not sure it is really going to get anyone who wasn't already interested in the book interested. I expected to see an image of Jamie and Claire on a horse together. I guess that was just me thinking what would they do if this was a romance novel. It isn't just that so I think that the simple cover is good. It leaves many things to the imagination that are best there.

My cover design

Summary: from Good Reads

The year is 1945. Claire Randall, a former combat nurse, is back from the war and reunited with her husband on a second honeymoon--when she walks through a standing stone in one of the ancient stone circles that dot the British Isles. Suddenly she is a Sassenach--an "outlander"--in a Scotland torn by war and raiding Highland clans in the year of Our Lord...1743.

Hurled back in time by forces she cannot understand, Claire is catapulted into intrigues and dangers that may threaten her life...and shatter her heart. For here she meets James Fraser, a gallant young Scots warrior, and becomes a woman torn between fidelity and desire...and between two vastly different men in two irreconcilable lives.

Feelings:
I had heard a bit about the book before it was picked as a cover blind read for me. I thought it would be more of juicy romance than it was. There was quite a bit of violence that I didn't expect. The beginning of the book was largely exposition and I had a hard time getting through it. Once Claire is with the Scots the book gets much more interesting.

I enjoyed reading this book a lot more than I thought I would. It wasn't just a romance it was more than that. Claire is stubborn and so are most of the other major characters. This leads to some interesting conversations and scenes in the book.

"You are not all right, and it's no wonder," I snapped, venting my fear and irritation. "What sort of idiot gets himself knifed and doesn't even stop to take care of it?[...]You're lucky you're not dead, tearing around the countryside all night, brawling and fighting and throwing yourself off horses . . . hold still, you bloody fool." (p. 54)

This is about where the story really started to get me interested. Jamie and Claire are strong characters and they pull the story forward.

I liked the new interpretation of what stone hedges were. Markers for rifts in time. That is really interesting to me.

I recommend this book.

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

Title: Ancillary Justice 
Author: Ann Leckie 
Type: Novel 
Genre: Science Fiction 
Series: Yes, Imperial Radch #1 
Pages: 409 
Copyright: 2013 
Publisher: Orbit 
Rating: 4 out of 5


Cover Rating: 2.5 out of 5
I do not think I would have read the book if I had seen this cover. I was picturing something more like a planet dark blue with a yellow line of light on the edge from maybe one of the lotuses that Breq carries. I don't think that the Star Wars theme cover is bad I just don't like it as much. I think I did a much better job imagining what the ships looked like that the cover does. Even though the cover does fit the book it doesn't make me what to read the book at all. Thus I would say it is a failure in that respect because what is inside is an amazing story.

Before Cover was drawn.

Summary: from Good Reads.
On a remote, icy planet, the soldier known as Breq is drawing closer to completing her quest.

Breq is both more than she seems and less than she was. Years ago, she was the Justice of Toren--a colossal starship with an artificial intelligence linking thousands of corpse soldiers in the service of the Radch, the empire that conquered the galaxy.

An act of treachery has ripped it all away, leaving her with only one fragile human body. And only one purpose--to revenge herself on Anaander Mianaai, many-bodied, near-immortal Lord of the Radch.

From debut author Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice is a stunning space opera that asks what it means to be human in a universe guided by artificial intelligence.

My idea for the cover

Feelings: 
I thought that this was a hard book to read. This was largely because of how gender is written. The narrative is in the first person and the narrator comes from a place were gender is neutral and thus has a hard time defining gender when she is talking in other languages and must identify the gender of the person she is talking to. The language the narrator speaks uses the female pronoun "she" "her" for all genders and this can get a bit confusing.

"I'll rent a sledge," I said, "and buy a hypothermia kit."
Behind me one of the patrons chuckled and said, voice mocking, "Aren't you a tough little girl." (p. 2)

This is the only indication I have of the narrators gender through out the book. Gender is often from another characters insight or comment and not from Breq. I really liked Breq, the narrator, she (using it here not because she is female but because that is the pronoun the book uses) is very different from most narrators I've read. There are many odd things that we learn as we travel with Breq. The book also follows Breq's character 20 years in the past leading to the events of today.

For the first fifty pages maybe more I found the lack of gender really hard to follow. However, I did get used to it and as we gathered a group of characters and stayed with them it got easier to follow what was happening and not get caught up in the oddness of only seeing the female pronoun used.

She was probably male, to judge from the angular mazelike patterns quilting her shirt. I wasn't entirely certain. It wouldn't have mattered, if I had been in Radch Space. Radichaai don't care much about gender, and the language they speak--my own first language--doesn't mark gender in any way. (p. 3)

I don't want to give to much away about the story because it was really good and I thought reading it without a cover or a story blurb added to the appeal of the story.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes Science Fiction.

The War of the Flowers by Tad Williams

Title: The War of the Flowers
Author: Tad Williams
Type: Novel
Genre: Fantasy
Series: No

Pages: 686
Copyright: 2003
Publisher: Daw Books, Inc 
Rating: 3 out of 5

This is the first book that I will be reading where I have someone cover the cover for me and read the book. Books that are read in such a way will be labeled "Cover Blind". I will not be seeing the cover of these books until after I have rated the book and created a rough design of what I think the cover might look like. My cover will be included in the post as will the real cover. I'm hiding mine down at the bottom because my artistic skills don't seem to extend to cover design.

Cover Rating: 1 out of 5
It should be noted the the entirety of the review was written without having seen the cover. This is the only section that was written after having seen the above cover image.

I would not have read this book if I had seen the cover first. The above image is the cover on the edition of the book that I read. I looked at a few of the other cover images, such as the one included to the left which I would have been more likely to pick up and read, but none of them really made me want to pick up and read the book. The one of the left is for the paperback edition of the book and it is by far the best cover of all that I saw. So if we go by this one book I defiantly need to stop judging books by their cover because I did enjoy this book.

Before I reveled the cover!

Summary: from GoodReads.
Returning to the fantasy genre that made him a coast-to-coast best-selling phenomenon, Tad Williams has written a new stand-alone contemporary novel set in Northern California-and also in the strange parallel world that coexists in the farthest reaches of the imagination.

Theo Vilmos is a thirty-year-old lead singer in a not terribly successful rock band. Once, he had enormous, almost magical, charisma both onstage and off-but now, life has taken its toll on Theo. Hitting an all-time low, he seeks refuge in a isolated cabin in the woods-and reads an odd memoir written by a dead relative who believed he had visited the magical world of Faerie. And before Theo can disregard the account as the writings of a madman, he, too, is drawn to a place beyond his wildest dreams...a place filled with be, and has always been, his destiny. 

Feelings:
At first I found this book hard to read. I thought Theo the main character was a little bit whiny. He isn't the most fun to spend time with. But I give a book as long as this one at least 100 pages to get good before I say no and move on to the next one. I ended up needing all 100 pages to get really into the story. I wondering if seeing the cover would have made it easier for me to read the book. I think it could easily have helped make me more interested in the story, it could also pushed me more into the why am I reading this category as well. I did really like the story in the end.

The War of the Flowers is in many ways a fairytale with a bit of a twist. What you have is two coexisting worlds that seem to, maybe, inhabit the same planet. I'm a little bit iffy on the exactness of the relationship between the mortal world and Fearie mostly because no one seems to understand it. In Fearie there are seven flower families, six when Theo arrives, and they disagree as to what to do about the power problems they are having. Something in the mortal world seems to be affecting it thous you have some that think it is best to get rid of the mortal problem and others think that there should be some kind of coexistence between them. A political drama that is confusing. I do see one problem which wasn't address which is, is it really coexistence if one side doesn't know the other exists? I'm drifting from the book, however, because this question is not addressed.

Because of it's political aspects the story is at times hard to follow. I did figure somethings out about  characters before they happened but it didn't take away from the book. At times I found some of the longer sections with lengthy explanations a bit hard to get through. This is already a long book and at times I thought maybe it was just a bit to dull in places. That doesn't sound very nice. It can't be all action all the time. Sometimes we have to slow down and get a better understanding of what is happening. While these slow downs were necessary for the story I found myself wanting to skip ahead. Applecore made the book readable in the slow sections because she was an entertaining character. I think if the book had followed Theo and not had Applecore and later Poppy as major supporting characters it would have been less appealing to me.

Back to the fairytale part; it follows a similar arc to most fairytales yet there is some question of happily ever after at the end which I appreciated. The ending of the book was the hardest part for me to swallow of the entire story, thus the 3.5 rating. I thought maybe there were a few to may bows and a few epiphanies that seemed a little late in the coming. The story was a good one and I really did enjoy reading it even without seeing the cover.

I would recommend this book to those that want an adult fairytale and like fantasy.

Cover Blind: 
This is just a rough sketch of what I think the cover might look like. I really home the actually cover is much better than what I came up with because if it isn't I guess I'm glad I read the book without a cover.

So if I was going to make this a little less rough of course I wouldn't have a colougue of images. Once I created what I was thinking it didn't actually seem as appealing as when I was imagining it. I wanted to include images of all seven of the flower houses, Hellebore, Daffodil, Foxglove, Thornapple, Primrose, and Violet. However, once I got the images around Theo and Applecore it didn't end up looking as good as I hoped it wold. Since this is a fairytale I think I would try and have a more fairytale feeling. The image below has some of the appeal of what I think of as a fairytale. I use one of the fairies from this image but the style of this image seems a bit more what I think of when I think of a typical image you might see on the cover of a book of fairytales.

There is only one problem with using this style, The war of the Flowers is a darker story. And thus this is a bit to light hearted for the actual story. I also thought about the possibility of having an image that was a little more interesting at least in my opinion of just a fairy, however, Theo is the main character and that seemed to have little to do with him or the war between the two worlds mortal and Faerie. I did find the image of the fairy by herself to be much more interesting. But it has little to do with the story so you have to incorporate other things into the cover as well. I don't think a cover should miss lead it's reader.

So while I like the image of just the fairy alone I don't think it is appropriate which is why in the end I created a cover that had Theo, I know Theo has longer hair I couldn't find an image I liked, and Applecore in the center and each of the flowers incorporated around the edges.

Four fairy panel credited to: http://www.layoutsparks.com/pictures/fairy-63

Fairy sitting Image credited to: www.hiresimg.com

Cover Blind

Do you ever pick up a book off the shelve at the library/bookstore and put it back before you even know what it is about because you really don't like the image on the cover? 

I have done this many times. In my better moments I know that I am judging books by their cover and that it doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't a good book. The same can go the other way, I know I have read a few books because I really liked the cover but in the end hated the book. If I hadn't liked the cover I probably never would have read those books in the first place because the description would have been such to make me less interested. So in attempt to be less judgmental of books based on their cover I will be reading books that have their covers covered over.

1. I will have someone pick out the books for me, and then cover over the cover with colored paper I can't see through or easily peak at the cover with. 
2. Then I will read the book or give it a good chance at least 100 pages, maybe more depending on the length. 
3. Books that are read in such a way will be labeled "Cover Blind" in their review. 
4. I will not see the cover of these books until after I have written the review, rated the book, and created a rough design of what I think the cover should be. My cover will be included in the post as will the real cover.
5. You will notice that reviews with the "Cover Blind" tag are much longer than other reviews because they include as section "Cover Blind" where I include the image of my cover design, gulp I may regret this later, and discus why I created the design I did. It will as include a "Cover Rating" where I rate the actual cover of the book and discus the cover. I may include other cover images if there are different covers for different editions.

I will be dedicating the four posts in November to books that I have read cover blind. I may expand and do more than four posts but I am going to start with four books as it may take me a while to get through them.