The 2009 Judge-a-Book-by-Its-Cover Competition

The Judge a 2009 Book by Its Cover Competition

- Eligibility: the novel must have been written by an Atlantic Canadian author, and the book (or version thereof)  must have been released in 2009.

- Salty Ink picked the longlist, the general public will vote for the month of February to create a shortlist of three, and a panel will choose a winner in March of 2010.

The Longlist is Below, the Shortlist of 3 will be up to YOU who vote.

- For the month of February, voting is open to the general book-loving public. You can only vote once, but you can vote for up to 3 books,

- Voting Open until February 28th.

- Click on Any of These Book Covers to Enlarge Them.

*** Click a Book’s Title to Read More about That Book.

Amphibian by Carla Gunn (Coach House Books, design by Alana Wilcox)

Atlantic Canada’s 100 Greatest Books by Trevor J. Adams and Stephen Patrick Clare (Nimbus, design by Co. & Co.)

Away from Everywhere by Chad Pelley (Breakwater Books, design by Rhonda Molloy)

Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant (Knopf Canada, design by Kelly Hill)

Downhill Chance by Donna Morrisey (Penguin Canada, design by Ingrid Paulson)

The Factory Voice by Jeanette Lynes (Coteau Books, design by Duncan Campbell)

Falling by Anne Simpson (McClelland & Stewart, design by Kelly Hill)

Going Fast by Elaine McCluskey (Goose Lane Editions, design by Julie Scriver)

Gun Dogs by James Langer (Anansi, design by Bill Douglas)

Hard ol Spot edited by Mike Heffernan (Creative Books, design by Darren Whelan)

Hit and Mrs. by Leslie Crewe (Vagrant Press, design by Heather Bryan)

Kit’s Law by Donna Morrisey (Penguin Canada, design by Ingrid Paulson)

Lovesongs of Emmanuel Taggart by Syr Ruus (Breakwater Books, design by Erin Cossar)

Migration Songs by Anon Quon (Invisible Publishing, design by Megan Fildes & art by Sydney Smith)

Mole by Patrick Warner (Anansi, design by Bill Douglas)

Never More There by Stephen Rowe (Nightwood Editions, design by Carelton Wilson)

One by Serge patrice Thibodeau (Goose Lane, design by Julie Scriver)

Rig: An Oral History of the Ocean Ranger Disaster by Mike Heffernan (Creative Books, design by Darren Whelan)

Scrabble Lessons by Leslie Vryenhoek (Oolichan Books, design by)

Sylvanus Now by Donna Morrisey (Penguin Canada, design by Ingrid Paulson)

This American Drive by Mike Holmes (Invisible Publishing, design by Megan Fildes and art by Mike Holmes)

The Wanton Troopers by Alden Nowlan (Goose Lane, design by Julie Scriver)

Where Genesis Begins by Tom Dawe and Gerry Squires (Breakwater Books, design by Beth Oberholtzer)

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SHORTLIST FOR THE 2009 SALTY INK JUDGE-A-BOOK-BY-ITS-COVER COMPETITION:

- After More Than a Thousand Votes and Emails, Here is the Shortlist for Salty Ink’s 2009 Judge A Book By its Cover Competition.

- The Winner to be announced on March 5th, Along With a A Chance to Win a Free Copy of the Winning Novel.

Migration Songs by Anon Quon (Invisible Publishing, design by Megan Fildes & art by Sydney Smith)

 From the Back Cover: Joan is on the brink. Cough drop addict, school bus driver, mixed race daughter of a Maoist English father and a Chinese-Canadian mother, Joan struggles for meaning after a friend’s death reveals a secret life. Migration Songs is a lost letter from your past, an intimate experience full of humour and grace.

“A strong debut from a new hopeful voice.”
Sue Carter Flinn, The Coast

“An engaging tale, peppered with memorable scenes and lovingly drawn characters.”
- Sarah Steinberg, Quill & Quire

The Factory Voice by Jeanette Lynes (Coteau Books, design by Duncan Campbell)

From the Back Cover: The lives and dreams of four vital, engaging, women revolve around mysterious events at a Fort William military aircraft factory in 1941.  Loyalty and betrayal, love and worthiness, friendship and ambition are the themes which connect the characters in this lively, quirky, fast-paced novel.

- A 2009 Globe and Mail “Book of the Year”

- Longlisted for the 2009 Giller Prize.

Hit and Mrs. by Leslie Crewe (Nimbus Publishing, design by Heather Bryan)

From the Back Cover: Linda, Bette, Gemma, and Augusta are four lifelong friends who live in Montreal. This year they’re all going to turn fifty, so they decide to take a trip to New York together (courtesy of Linda’s philandering husband’s Visa Platinum). But at the LaGuardia airport washroom, Bette accidentally switches bags with a young mother who’s actually smuggling diamonds for the mob, and things start going terribly wrong. When they kill an aggressive cab driver with pepper spray, the four friends know this is not going to be the trip of shopping and Broadway shows they’d expected.

“If you’re in the mood for a cute chick-lit mystery with some nice gals in Montreal, Hit & Mrs. is just the ticket.”
- Margaret Cannon, The Globe and Mail

Winner of Salty Ink’s 2009 Judge a Book by Its Cover Competition: Anna Quon’s Migration Songs

As much as I love good book design, we all know you can’t really judge a book by its cover. I thought it was a clever competition title and a fun way to showcase some books, but I’m glad, after a thousand votes, that Migration Songs won this competition, because as the cover suggests: this book is something different, and something good. It’s clear in the opening lines that Anna is an impressive writer, and her debut shows great promise. There is wit, humour, sadness, sincerity, compassion, and humanity in these pages. Most impressively, there is a true originality in her descriptions, they are fresh, informative, and distinctive; there is nothing dull about how she portrays things, and she provides handfuls of laugh-out-loud passages.

And watch this title reveal I believe the designer might have borrowed from:

“For so long, it was my parents’ story that gripped me, overshadowing my own. My life has always been merely a tendril off the vine of theirs, creeping toward the sunshine. It never bothered me to be a sideshow, an afterthought. But something calls to me from the future — a bird sound, like that of geese in flight, faint but insistent — a song of remembering, pushing out feathers I never knew were mine.”

We meet the story’s main character, Joan, as a 29 year old schoolbus-driving cough drop junky who’s cherry-flavoured Halls sooth her more than her shrink can. She’s moved back in with her parents. She’s anxious, lost, and looking for where she belongs.

“I was so nervous the first day when the kids piled in that I downed 3 Halls in 15 minutes, sucking at them until my cheeks ached, and my tongue went numb.” Feeling that the children were “too perishable to be transported in a rickety old bus with maroon vinyl seats by someone of my undependability.”

At its core you might call it a book about identity, a needing to know where you come from, a meditation on belonging. In fact, a good portion of the novel is a literal explanation of how Joan came to be: a 65-page-long retelling of her parents history and courtship “that was, of course, in the first days of their courtship before their hearts became deaf to one another. Before they were like two fish swimming in tanks side by side — they could see one another but, for all intents and purposes inhabited separate oceans.” While the 65-page dip into her parents’ story was arguably the strongest plotline in the novel, the writing really shines when Quon gets to Joan’s story, where she’ll just drop the occasional paragraph-long passage so remarkable that you stop and read it twice to marvel at the writing itself. She cuts characters out well too. “My father is Englishman with the black hair and blue eyes of an Irishman … he’s been in Canada since I was born but he still refuses to sing ‘Oh Canada’ or pledge allegiance to the queen — he’s anti-monarchy.” And “the fact that he even has a study in this day and age is a clue to what kind of man he is. Private. Retiring. Well-read. On special occasions, he smokes a cigar in there and the smooth scent of it creeps out from under the study floor. The aroma of my father’s absence.”

Again, tying into the design of the book, there are some well-worded bird analogies or metaphors woven throughout the whole novel, which allude to their sense of community or rituals that Joan doesn’t have. How she chooses to see and depict birds, at any given moment in the novel – trapped within a tree or flying free – seems to be a reflection of how she feels in that moment. Joan spends a great deal of time in some sort of fond jealousy of birds, in between the cough drop popping.