Malinda Lo

The original cover

By now, I thought the controversy over the cover for Justine Larbalestier’s novel Liar would have died down, but to my surprise, the discussion is still going strong. (This is good!)

If you’re not familiar with what happened, here’s the short version: Liar is a YA novel about a liar. The main character happens to African American and tomboyish. The American publisher, Bloomsbury, initially designed a cover featuring a white girl. There was a general outcry. Bloomsbury, to many folks’ amazement, changed the cover; it now depicts a somewhat feminine African American girl.

Links to the discussion: Jacket Knack (via Fuse #8), What’s the Story? Reflections on White Privilege in the Publication of Children’s Books (via @JustineLavaworm), Steph Su’s discussion of the cover, Color Online calls for book bloggers to respond, Justine Larbalestier’s original post.

I didn’t have a chance to comment on this when it first happened because I was out of town for so long, but since it continues to be discussed, I wanted to mention a few things.

The new cover

First, I am very glad that Bloomsbury changed their cover. I am a little disheartened that they chose a feminine girl to represent the tomboyish main character, but I’m not surprised. If there’s anything even more difficult to find in mainstream media than people of color, it’s representations of girls (or boys) who don’t fit gender norms. I’ve written about this before (here, here, here).

Let me just say this: Now that I understand a little more about the main character in Liar, I am so buying this book. The older cover did not interest me at all because I thought the book was about a pretty white girl who lies. Now that I have a better idea of who the main character is, I’m way more interested in it.

Second, I just wanted to share a little bit about the cover design process for my book, Ash.

When I wrote Ash, I made a conscious decision to not be overt about the race of my characters for several reasons. For one thing, Ash is a fantasy novel set in a world that is not our own, and I did not want to bring our own conceptions of race into this fictional world.* For another thing, Ash turns out to fall in love with a woman, and I felt like the gay factor was probably going to be enough off-putting for the mainstream. Why tack on race on top of that?

So I blogged about it last October. My editor read that blog post, and she later emailed me and said she told the art department about it so that they could make sure the race of the girl on the cover would fit appropriately.

I was really surprised to get that email. I thought it was incredibly thoughtful, because in my experience (I used to be an editorial assistant at Ballantine), authors have pretty much zero say in what goes on the cover, and often covers depict people who look nothing like the characters in the books. When I saw the cover for Ash, I was floored not only because it was so beautiful, but because I actually thought the girl could be Asian. You can’t see her face too clearly (which is also good because it allows the reader some latitude in imagining her), but it definitely does not exclude Asianness. Maybe this was just a matter of luck, but my editor’s note told me that the publisher did make an effort to be inclusive and representative here.

My U.K. publisher has also stepped up. When I got the initial design for my U.K. cover, the girl depicted in the illustration actually had reddish-blonde hair. I noticed this, but before I had a chance to say anything, my agent said she’d ask them to darken her hair color because Ash is not a redhead. In the later cover proof I received, her hair had become a dark brown — which is the color described in the book.

So. These are tiny little things here, in comparison to the giant snafu that was the Liar cover, but I just wanted to share a couple of, well, positive stories about covers and representation. Some people out there really do get it.

Oh, and don’t forget! Ask me questions about Ash and you might win a poster!

* My opinions about this are a bit different now. I might blog about this more later, but suffice it to say that in my next book, it is much more obvious that characters are “Asian.”