Janet Skeslien Charles' novel Moonlight in Odessa (Bloomsbury) was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of their top ten debut novels of Fall 2009 and received the 2010 Melissa Nathan Award for Comedy Romance. It was a Book of the Month selection in National Geographic Traveler. BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime featured Moonlight in Odessa for two weeks in February 2010. Foreign rights have been sold in 12 languages. Janet has led writing workshops at the American Library in Paris, WICE, and Shakespeare & Co and is currently working on her second novel. She is originally from Montana but has lived in Paris since 1999.
Cover Story by Janet Skeslien Charles
We all judge books by their covers, which is why so much thought and work goes into creating them. Here, we look at a few covers for my novel Moonlight in Odessa, which is a novel about Daria, an email-order bride who travels to America looking for a better life with her new husband. When she arrives in America, she finds out little by little that he isn’t exactly who he said he was.
The cover that Amy King designed for Bloomsbury US features the port of Odessa. I love the stamps and postmark, the image of the port with a sliver of a ship in the corner, and the way the romantic-sounding title of the novel is offset by the stark black font. However, I could understand the point that others made — they felt that the image was ‘too quiet and literary.’
Natalie Slocum designed the second image. The red cover is striking, and the way she has used the image of the Golden Gate Bridge as a metaphor for Daria’s American Dream is brilliant.
When my editor Helen Garnons-Williams bought Moonlight in Odessa, she asked what I’d like to see on the cover. We both felt that the snow globe was an important image in the novel, and I am delighted to see that this image is used on both the US and UK covers. On the British cover, I love the way Sarah Morris Greeno has shown both the old city of Odessa (in dark blue) as well as the Soviet section of Odessa (in light blue).
The mass-market edition of Moonlight edition comes out in September worldwide, except the UK, where it will come out January 2010. Designer Sarah Morris Greeno played around with different looks and colors for this edition.
Davy van der Elsken designed both Dutch covers. This cover is a shocking image of a beautiful woman who is trapped in a box, a striking metaphor for the novel. Sites like www.loveme.com and amorsi.com are similar to Amazon.com, and Davy conveys this feeling of ordering a woman so well.
In the end, Mouria, the publishing house in the Netherlands, decided to go with another cover. Here we see a cover that is rich in images — icons of American and Ukrainian/ Russian architecture, a wall that is crumbling down, a wedding-top couple atop a…. toilet. This is a bold cover that does not shy away from the darker elements of the book.
The creativity of each artist amazes me, and I love how each one has chosen to present the novel, each one emphasizing the dreamy, romantic, quirky, ironic, fun, and scary elements of the novel.
For more information about Moonlight in Odessa, as well as author interviews, links for writers, and more great covers, please visit www.jskesliencharles.com.
