Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Covers I’d Frame as Art

This week, The Broke and the Bookish is asking for the Top Ten Book Covers I’d Frame as Art. These maybe aren’t all things I would frame and hang up, but they would be displayed somehow.

 

Wondershow by Hannah Barnaby. I love this cover – the muted colors and the way everything looks like paper cutouts.

 

The Fairyland Series by Catherynne M. Valente: I would LOVE these as plates or something. Eggs? DRAGON EGGS? I’m getting ideas.

 

Charm and Strange by Stephanie Kuehn: I love this paperback cover. This is only the first wolfy cover on the list, but they fit in so well with the decor I already have. Here is our decorating “theme”: wolf things because of the dog, cat things because I’m a weirdo cat lady, Smokey the Bear, San Jose Sharks. It’s a mess. But we just got some vintage-y Smokey the Bear juice jars that I’ve started using almost exclusively.

 

The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness: I think if this was hanging it my house my heart would break every time I looked at it (good boy, Manchee ilu).

 

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami: See? Weirdo cat lady. I would love a poster of this cat butt. I’m imagining it in my library/reading room. The walls are kind of minty green or light light gray and there are a lot of poster size covers that have white backgrounds and not much happening.

 

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott: This is probably my favorite cover EVER. I think it would be fun to get the pattern and make it myself and hang OR what about an embroidered throw blanket that has this on it? Obviously it would have to stay in my magical made up library/reading room.

 

The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater: I really like this edition’s cover BUT what if that horse had a twin and they were book ends?

The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater: If it’s not already obvious, I just searched through “all editions” of books I love on Goodreads. I wouldn’t want art of books I didn’t like or haven’t read. I’m so drawn to this cover, but I can’t actually picture it hanging in the house anywhere.

 

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck: I love this cover, but Cannery Row is also sort of a sentimental place for me since Monterey is where Marshall and I met and got married and lived. We used to walk around Cannery Row all the time and he would tell me stories about growing up there.

 

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling: I don’t even want/like children, but if I was decorating a nursery or a child’s bedroom for some reason, I would definitely use the covers from this edition. It’s just so weird! Am I not remembering a part where Harry has to be disguised as a giant rat in order to infiltrate a giant-rat gang? Can we make that a thing?

 

 

 

 

Review: Charm and Strange

Book Title/Author: Charm and Strange by Stephani Kuehn
Publication Date/Publisher: June 11, 2013/St. Martin’s Griffin

Series: No
Source and Format: Received an advanced reader copy from publisher and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review
Rating: 4 stars

From Goodreads:

When you’ve been kept caged in the dark, it’s impossible to see the forest for the trees. It’s impossible to see anything, really. Not without bars . . .

Andrew Winston Winters is at war with himself.

He’s part Win, the lonely teenager exiled to a remote Vermont boarding school in the wake of a family tragedy. The guy who shuts all his classmates out, no matter the cost.

He’s part Drew, the angry young boy with violent impulses that control him. The boy who spent a fateful, long-ago summer with his brother and teenage cousins, only to endure a secret so monstrous it led three children to do the unthinkable.

Over the course of one night, while stuck at a party deep in the New England woods, Andrew battles both the pain of his past and the isolation of his present.

Before the sun rises, he’ll either surrender his sanity to the wild darkness inside his mind or make peace with the most elemental of truths—that choosing to live can mean so much more than not dying.

WHAT THE WHAT!?

I’d read in other reviews that it was best to go into Charm and Strange without knowing anything about it. And then I saw one review that had a certain word in it (and it comes up early in the book, so it’s not like a spoiler, but still) so I was sure that it was going to ruin everything for me.

I think everyone has been saying to go in blind because there is no way to talk about this book without saying everything.

I normally don’t get blown away by dual perspective books, but Charm and Strange knocks it out of the park. Win and Drew tell the story in past and the present alternating chapters. There is enough information revealed each time, and the chapters are so short, that it works. The only thing keeping this from being 5 stars for me is that the ending is so rushed that I almost missed what happened. It’s the same pacing the rest of the book has, but I felt like it should have been a bigger moment.

Charm and Strange is a book that will stay with me for a long time. It’s wonderfully written and the story just gets into your bones.