Thank you! I tried to google it but without any concrete details (I’m getting old, my memory is… ugh) I wasn’t finding it. Greatly appreciated!

I'm team letter, and also can understand why Verity wouldn't write "exercise practice" on it. I like to dabble with my own dark drabbles when I want to get into the head/mindset of a villain. The thought of marking it as an exercise never crosses my mind because no one ever digs through my belongings, and I trust them not to do so. Verity does establish in her manuscript that Jeremy doesn't read her stories and she already trusts him a lot.

It's also a writer's thing to print out manuscripts so they can look at it through a fresh lense. Another trick you may see from writers is changing their font, but printing is considered the standard. Although, I do want to add... Mine and Verity's practices, while similar, are not the same. I stay very clear from real life people and settings.

With the letter being in the floor boards... I always assumed that was meant to be an endgame move. As in, Verity would take it out once she was ready for it to be found and she wasn't expecting it to end as it had.

I do agree with your other points, though! The book needed a bit more refining, I think, but it's still an enjoyable read for the most part.

Feast your eyes on these refined and elegant French covers: https://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/?p=7462

Or, possibly, whole countries don't have set styles in their book publishing, you're just generalizing off of a few examples.

I thought they were awful and was on the verge of permanently giving up on his books, but The Judge's List (sequel to The Whistler) wasn't bad so I'm giving him another chance.

One of my great pet peeves as a child was when the book I was reading had the movie cover, because then you just knew in the center of the book was a bunch of spoiler filled glossy screencaps from the movie. Also, those were always the ugliest covers.

I honestly believe covers should be like a vibe synopsis, if that makes sense. The summary on the back tells you what the book is about, but you should be able to look at a cover and identify the zeitgeist of the book.

6th of July is what they say now.. So there's hope.

The original Throne of Glass series covers are atrocious. I was so glad they rereleased with new beautiful covers before I invested in the series.

It looks like a screencap from one of those sims 4 movies that teenagers love to make.

Incredibly vague spacey cover art is an SF staple, unfortunately. Even if it's a painting by one of the great SF illustrators, you get something like this:

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/32/86/44/32864474fb29909054ec3ff128bb4f65.jpg

That does not tell me much, no.

One of my favorite sci fi authors, Jo Walton, had a book called Poor Relations which was very close to publication (even had cover art already) that was pulled and will never be published. It is a future sci fi but in a Dickensian class system, that involved the two main male characters becoming female under family pressure. Based on her other books, I think Walton would have handled this with intelligence and grace, but I can see why forced gender change is controversial and potentially dangerous territory to wade into and made the publisher nervous.

I'm conflicted. A lot of lessons from the boarding school stories stayed with me as an adult and I didn't really internalize any of the meanness or classism. On one hand, there is a theme of valuing education for its own sake regardless of gender. The girls never think less of themselves for their gender and are encouraged to pursue their passions, whether that's their vocations or college. Even Ms. Grayling's speech is about being women that the world can lean on. There are lessons that resonated with me: don't be a tattletale, don't cheat yourself by not working hard, handle your shit. I guess I read Malory Towers first and St Clare's, which is a lot bitchier, when I was older. The classist storyline about how Sheila is insecure about her non-elegant manners and speech and how the girls make fun of her for it always made me uncomfortable, even as a child. But there are also non-British non-snobby characters who are the best-written characters of the book, including Claudine and Carlotta. Also, Alicia gets her comeuppance (sort of) for being bitchy and mellows out by the last book.

They are very mean to Alison, I agree.

Every great book that gets adapted to a movie/series and then they use the posters from the adaptations as book covers.

If the fine is over what you can afford without going hungry or not paying bills, talk to your librarian about options. It's bad that you've lost a book that's hard to replace, it would be worse if you got sick over it or something because it's a thing and you're a person, so libraries often have alternatives, instalments or ways to lower the fine.

"Saturn's Children" by Charles Stross. The cover isn't totally non-topical, but it really does not do the book justice. Stross himself has expressed frustration about it.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/298976/saturns-children-by-charles-stross/9780441017317

It's not invaluable. It's valued at ~$1,000.

Let's not pretend the information in that book is invaluable, it's a picture collection you can likely find a digital equivalent of that's more convenient to use. The invaluable thing is compassion and empathy, your carelessness with your words is what's depriving communities of nice things.

My library allows you to replace the book with something equivalent. That is a nice option, especially when my kids were small and continually losing their library books. (Before I get chastised for not being more careful, "continually" is hyperbole...it was a small handful of books over a period of 10-15 years of almost weekly library trips lol.)

they're all bullshit, don't read books like that

Sorry but the downvoted comment you are responding to has this correct: the lawsuit was precipitated by the Archive deciding copyright law was null and void “because Covid.”

Instead of “controlled digital lending” which is what you describe at the start of your comment, the Archive was offering unlimited copies of everything it had in its collection.

Note: I fully support format shifting and contend that it’s a logical extension of the Betamax case (time shifting necessarily involves format shifting) and I’m absolutely incensed about those assholes at the Archive doing their level best to give the court an excuse to rule in favor of the publishers.

The publishers could not have asked for a better set of facts to litigate if they had tried.

I just looked it up and if you told me the publisher accidentally sent the designer the wrong summary, I would believe you. That’s hilarious. It absolutely looks like a trashy novel about a cheating wife.

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> Grisham's last good book was The Racketeer, published in 2012.

The Whistler, Camino Island and The Guardians were good too. And that's probably why I felt a bit underwhelmed by this latest book.

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I love to collect vintage/antique books and my favorite terrible cover that I own is for a copy of The Road Through The Wall by Shirley Jackson. It's about an upper middle class neighborhood where people are upset that a wall separating them from lower class homes will be torn down. There's also a mystery about a missing child. The cover shows a couple embracing with a tantalizing tag line "A married woman prowls the back streets!" It has almost nothing to do with the actual book and I fear anyone who picked it up based on the cover will believe it's some sort of romance when it definitely isn't.